November 8, 2009
Hunter College Professor Who Photographed the People of Harlem Dies at 89
When, as a budding photographer, Roy DeCarava applied for a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952, his proposal stated: "I want to show the
strength, the wisdom, the dignity of the Negro people. Not the famous
and the well known, but the unknown and the unnamed, thus revealing the
roots from which springs the greatness of all human beings."
That year he became the first African-American photographer to receive a Guggenheim, and he spent 57 more years advancing his goals. He was still pursuing them last month just before he died, six weeks shy of his 90th birthday.
Mr. DeCarava, one of the most celebrated of American photographers, taught photography at the City University of New York's Hunter College from 1975 until his death after a brief illness.
A distinguished professor of art at Hunter since 1988, Mr. DeCarava was acclaimed for his images of Harlem and of jazz musicians. He won the National Medal of Arts in 2006.
He drew most of his subject matter from everyday life in Harlem. As he told The Chronicle in 1997, his art reflected his sense of responsibility to black Americans: "It was unjust that they should go through life unseen."
On a Facebook page created in Mr. DeCarava's honor, former students have thanked him both for lessons in photography—for instance, his instruction that if you have to use a zoom lens, then you're not close enough to the scene to capture it—and for broader guidance. He taught, as one former student puts it, "that to shoot life, you have to live it."
That year he became the first African-American photographer to receive a Guggenheim, and he spent 57 more years advancing his goals. He was still pursuing them last month just before he died, six weeks shy of his 90th birthday.
Mr. DeCarava, one of the most celebrated of American photographers, taught photography at the City University of New York's Hunter College from 1975 until his death after a brief illness.
A distinguished professor of art at Hunter since 1988, Mr. DeCarava was acclaimed for his images of Harlem and of jazz musicians. He won the National Medal of Arts in 2006.
He drew most of his subject matter from everyday life in Harlem. As he told The Chronicle in 1997, his art reflected his sense of responsibility to black Americans: "It was unjust that they should go through life unseen."
On a Facebook page created in Mr. DeCarava's honor, former students have thanked him both for lessons in photography—for instance, his instruction that if you have to use a zoom lens, then you're not close enough to the scene to capture it—and for broader guidance. He taught, as one former student puts it, "that to shoot life, you have to live it."
In images that were as artistic as they were documentary, Mr.
DeCarava depicted neighbors singing, workmen trudging home, and
musicians playing, embracing, or merely walking from the stage. His
subjects' purpose, perseverance, and elegance despite dire circumstances
embodied "a life force that each of us has, a will to live and a will
to be here," he said.
He found in their lives a radiance that, paradoxically, he captured in shadows and dark hues. Using hand-held cameras and only natural light, he transformed conditions that most photographers would consider obstacles into a personal aesthetic of light and life. His images, although often dim, glimmer redemptively.
In jazz masters and jazz journeymen, he saw spiritual transport and "human beings with all of the latitudes and grandeur and smallness that allowed them to create this music that we were all listening to." The Sound I Saw, a collection of his portraits of jazz artists, interspersed with his own poetry, appeared in 2001.
Mr. DeCarava grew up in Harlem, the only child of a single mother, a Jamaican immigrant. While a high-school student, he worked in the poster division of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. He won a scholarship to study at the prestigious Cooper Union, only to leave after two years due to racial hostility from the institution's virtually all-white student body. After a stint in the Army, he attended two Harlem art schools, and mingled in the area's thriving intellectual circles with such eminent painters as Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Norman Lewis.
After first working as a painter, he began to concentrate on photography in his late 20s. It provided the tonalities he needed, he told The Chronicle: "It's just one seamless grain from black to white. And for me, the beauty, the distinctive quality of photography is this seamless movement from black to white."
In 1955, Edward Steichen, a champion of photography-as-art, presented three of Mr. DeCarava's prints in the Museum of Modern Art's landmark "Family of Man" exhibition.
The same year, Mr. DeCarava published The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a book of images accompanied by Langston Hughes's fictional portrait of a Harlem family.
Mr. DeCarava worked as a free-lance photographer for major media companies but said that it was not until Hunter College hired him that he was able to concentrate fully on his artistic output.
In 1996, MoMA mounted a retrospective of 190 of his images, which toured 10 cities over two years.
Fellow African-American photographers, such as the members of Kamoinge, a collective that he helped establish in Harlem in 1963, hailed him last month as a revered father figure. Similarly generous tributes have come from Hunter College colleagues and officials. Jeffrey Mongrain, a sculptor who has been a professor of art at Hunter College since 1995, said: "Roy taught as an artist more than as, say, a historian. He was an example of what he taught, and he taught what he loved. Students who studied with him understood they were enjoying the influence of his history as a creative individual. That was his great strength."
Mr. DeCarava, who compiled music of his favorite jazz greats—his taste was impeccable—and played them in the darkroom where his students worked, said in 1997 that teaching was one of his great joys: "I can't think of another way of making a living that's as rewarding."
He found in their lives a radiance that, paradoxically, he captured in shadows and dark hues. Using hand-held cameras and only natural light, he transformed conditions that most photographers would consider obstacles into a personal aesthetic of light and life. His images, although often dim, glimmer redemptively.
In jazz masters and jazz journeymen, he saw spiritual transport and "human beings with all of the latitudes and grandeur and smallness that allowed them to create this music that we were all listening to." The Sound I Saw, a collection of his portraits of jazz artists, interspersed with his own poetry, appeared in 2001.
Mr. DeCarava grew up in Harlem, the only child of a single mother, a Jamaican immigrant. While a high-school student, he worked in the poster division of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. He won a scholarship to study at the prestigious Cooper Union, only to leave after two years due to racial hostility from the institution's virtually all-white student body. After a stint in the Army, he attended two Harlem art schools, and mingled in the area's thriving intellectual circles with such eminent painters as Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Norman Lewis.
After first working as a painter, he began to concentrate on photography in his late 20s. It provided the tonalities he needed, he told The Chronicle: "It's just one seamless grain from black to white. And for me, the beauty, the distinctive quality of photography is this seamless movement from black to white."
In 1955, Edward Steichen, a champion of photography-as-art, presented three of Mr. DeCarava's prints in the Museum of Modern Art's landmark "Family of Man" exhibition.
The same year, Mr. DeCarava published The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a book of images accompanied by Langston Hughes's fictional portrait of a Harlem family.
Mr. DeCarava worked as a free-lance photographer for major media companies but said that it was not until Hunter College hired him that he was able to concentrate fully on his artistic output.
In 1996, MoMA mounted a retrospective of 190 of his images, which toured 10 cities over two years.
Fellow African-American photographers, such as the members of Kamoinge, a collective that he helped establish in Harlem in 1963, hailed him last month as a revered father figure. Similarly generous tributes have come from Hunter College colleagues and officials. Jeffrey Mongrain, a sculptor who has been a professor of art at Hunter College since 1995, said: "Roy taught as an artist more than as, say, a historian. He was an example of what he taught, and he taught what he loved. Students who studied with him understood they were enjoying the influence of his history as a creative individual. That was his great strength."
Mr. DeCarava, who compiled music of his favorite jazz greats—his taste was impeccable—and played them in the darkroom where his students worked, said in 1997 that teaching was one of his great joys: "I can't think of another way of making a living that's as rewarding."
October 8, 2012
Veteran of Billion-Dollar Campaigns Takes His Expertise Down the Road
That John B. Ford has become the vice chancellor for
university development and alumni relations at the University of
California at San Francisco may strike colleagues as odd.
After all, didn't the renowned fund raiser retire when he left Stanford University in 2008?
Not really, says Mr. Ford, who had been Stanford's vice president for university resources: "I loved my job," but leaving was a case of "getting out of the way at the right time." Stanford was one year into a major campaign—one of three exceeding $1-billion that he led—"but I thought it was right for Stanford to get a fresh leader, with a fresh perspective." Martin Shell, whom Mr. Ford praises as one of higher education's great fund raisers, stepped in.
And Mr. Ford was relatively young—he is now only 62—and wondered what else he might do. So he went to work at ClimateWorks, an international policy group, and then the World Wildlife Fund. He also served as chair of the board of Marts & Lundy, a New Jersey consulting firm that advises nonprofit organizations on raising money.
With all that, Mr. Ford knows what difficulties fund raisers at public institutions face. But overcoming those will be essential, he says, for UCSF, a leading health-sciences university and medical center in a state system where legislative allocations have been pinched, to put it mildly.
"John is arriving at a fiscally challenging and exciting time in the history of UCSF," said Susan Desmond-Hellman, its chancellor, in a written statement welcoming him.
That it's "challenging," is not in doubt. "Exciting" also seems about right, to Mr. Ford. He says the position appealed to him even before it even became available, when he had an opportunity to talk with Dr. Desmond-Hellmann about the university's plans. Introducing them was a longtime friend of Mr. Ford's, William E. Oberndorf, who chairs the board of the UCSF Foundation. Mr. Ford says he was "captivated" by what the chancellor was trying to do with development. That sold him—that and the fact that "you can't be at Stanford, 30 miles down the road, and not know what a terrific institution UCSF is."
Over a decade, the university's state allocations have dropped from 16 percent to 5 percent of its budget of about $3.9-billion. Private donations are also at 5 percent. If a ballot initiative to raise taxes fails in November, state allocations will plummet even more.
Such is the challenge, says Mr. Ford. He confronts it with a 154-person team and a $30-million annual budget. He is also vice president of the UCSF Foundation, whose $650-million endowment is governed by 44 Bay Area movers and shakers.
Heartening for him, Mr. Ford says, is the university's success in attracting gifts. In recent years, for example, it has raised $400-million for the Bay Area's first new medical center in decades, scheduled for completion by 2015. It has also taken steps to improve its health-sciences education and top-notch neuroscience programs. Individual grants have included several in the high millions. Last month, the billionaire businessman Charles Feeney topped up the $270-million he had already contributed with $20-million for the university's global-health program.
Successful fund raising requires good organization and responsiveness to potential donors. Personal flair and building contacts count. But in all those efforts, what most wins support is to convey the university's accomplishments, says Mr. Ford. "I'm looking forward to telling many absolutely magnificent stories about the faculty here," he says. And that includes reminding alumni about what the institution gave them. "I'm delighted," he says, "that there are people here who are more expert than I am who are already engaged in that task."
Will he, and they, be able to make up for losses in state support? "That depends on the scale of what we've got here," he says. He intends, at least, to stick around to see: "I signed on with Sue, this chancellor, and I intend to really roll up my sleeves and work as hard as I can with her and the UCSF Foundation board."
After all, didn't the renowned fund raiser retire when he left Stanford University in 2008?
Not really, says Mr. Ford, who had been Stanford's vice president for university resources: "I loved my job," but leaving was a case of "getting out of the way at the right time." Stanford was one year into a major campaign—one of three exceeding $1-billion that he led—"but I thought it was right for Stanford to get a fresh leader, with a fresh perspective." Martin Shell, whom Mr. Ford praises as one of higher education's great fund raisers, stepped in.
And Mr. Ford was relatively young—he is now only 62—and wondered what else he might do. So he went to work at ClimateWorks, an international policy group, and then the World Wildlife Fund. He also served as chair of the board of Marts & Lundy, a New Jersey consulting firm that advises nonprofit organizations on raising money.
With all that, Mr. Ford knows what difficulties fund raisers at public institutions face. But overcoming those will be essential, he says, for UCSF, a leading health-sciences university and medical center in a state system where legislative allocations have been pinched, to put it mildly.
"John is arriving at a fiscally challenging and exciting time in the history of UCSF," said Susan Desmond-Hellman, its chancellor, in a written statement welcoming him.
That it's "challenging," is not in doubt. "Exciting" also seems about right, to Mr. Ford. He says the position appealed to him even before it even became available, when he had an opportunity to talk with Dr. Desmond-Hellmann about the university's plans. Introducing them was a longtime friend of Mr. Ford's, William E. Oberndorf, who chairs the board of the UCSF Foundation. Mr. Ford says he was "captivated" by what the chancellor was trying to do with development. That sold him—that and the fact that "you can't be at Stanford, 30 miles down the road, and not know what a terrific institution UCSF is."
Over a decade, the university's state allocations have dropped from 16 percent to 5 percent of its budget of about $3.9-billion. Private donations are also at 5 percent. If a ballot initiative to raise taxes fails in November, state allocations will plummet even more.
Such is the challenge, says Mr. Ford. He confronts it with a 154-person team and a $30-million annual budget. He is also vice president of the UCSF Foundation, whose $650-million endowment is governed by 44 Bay Area movers and shakers.
Heartening for him, Mr. Ford says, is the university's success in attracting gifts. In recent years, for example, it has raised $400-million for the Bay Area's first new medical center in decades, scheduled for completion by 2015. It has also taken steps to improve its health-sciences education and top-notch neuroscience programs. Individual grants have included several in the high millions. Last month, the billionaire businessman Charles Feeney topped up the $270-million he had already contributed with $20-million for the university's global-health program.
Successful fund raising requires good organization and responsiveness to potential donors. Personal flair and building contacts count. But in all those efforts, what most wins support is to convey the university's accomplishments, says Mr. Ford. "I'm looking forward to telling many absolutely magnificent stories about the faculty here," he says. And that includes reminding alumni about what the institution gave them. "I'm delighted," he says, "that there are people here who are more expert than I am who are already engaged in that task."
Will he, and they, be able to make up for losses in state support? "That depends on the scale of what we've got here," he says. He intends, at least, to stick around to see: "I signed on with Sue, this chancellor, and I intend to really roll up my sleeves and work as hard as I can with her and the UCSF Foundation board."
October 1, 2012
NYU's New York Institute for the Humanities Prepares for Director's Departure
Starrett Art Studios
After 11 years leading a distinctive intellectual meeting place, Lawrence M. Weschler has said that the 12th year will be his last.
He will step down next September as director of the New York Institute for the Humanities—not without pressure from administrators at New York University, the institute's host. In July the university eliminated the position but then responded to protests by many of the institute's 220 fellows by pushing the termination back a year—"to give all of us a chance to take stock and devise a more considered transition," as Mr. Weschler put it in a letter to the fellows.
The university has signaled that it may make the directorship a part-time component of an NYU faculty member's workload.
Since 1976 the humanities institute has been a meeting place for New York's public intellectuals, fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, editors, journalists, psychologists, literary agents, academics, and artists in visual media, theater, and music. They can go each Friday to lunchtime lectures and discussions of one another's work, and to seminars, conferences, discussions, readings, and performances. The public is also welcome to attend, free, space permitting.
One result of Mr. Weschler's directorship is that the institute also holds occasional, daylong symposia on varied themes. One slated for next month is on solitary confinement.
Mr. Weschler fostered "a wondrously generative" mix of fellows, says Ellen Handler Spitz, a professor of visual arts at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and a six-year fellow at the institute.
Even as he held his full-time position, Mr. Weschler was involved in an impressive range of other activities; from 2006 to 2010, for example, he also directed the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Now he is seeking fellowships and residencies, intent on writing a new book on class, race, and violence in America.
Talk among fellows of, say, forming a breakaway institute outside NYU's control have quieted since September, when Mr. Weschler called for an assembly of fellows to find a constructive approach to the changes. He and 40 fellows worked on "devising a strategy moving forward," he said in an e-mail.
NYU administrators, too, are being conciliatory. John H. Beckman, vice president for public affairs, said via e-mail that Mr. Weschler "has done a superb job as the director of the institute, ... but at a good number of points in the institute's history, the director has been an NYU faculty member, and we expect to return to that construct." Mr. Weschler was a longtime writer at The New Yorker when he was appointed, in 2001.
"What form precisely the institute's work will take at that point, I cannot say," Mr. Beckman wrote." "That will be up to the new director to work out with the institute's fellows."
Some fellows remain skeptical about what's ahead. One of them, Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University who has worked at NYU and is the author of numerous books and of occasional essays in The Chronicle Review, said, "All institutions of that scale are opaque, and NYU is not low on the opacity scale."
Linda A. Cicero, Stanford News Service
He will step down next September as director of the New York Institute for the Humanities—not without pressure from administrators at New York University, the institute's host. In July the university eliminated the position but then responded to protests by many of the institute's 220 fellows by pushing the termination back a year—"to give all of us a chance to take stock and devise a more considered transition," as Mr. Weschler put it in a letter to the fellows.
The university has signaled that it may make the directorship a part-time component of an NYU faculty member's workload.
Since 1976 the humanities institute has been a meeting place for New York's public intellectuals, fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, editors, journalists, psychologists, literary agents, academics, and artists in visual media, theater, and music. They can go each Friday to lunchtime lectures and discussions of one another's work, and to seminars, conferences, discussions, readings, and performances. The public is also welcome to attend, free, space permitting.
One result of Mr. Weschler's directorship is that the institute also holds occasional, daylong symposia on varied themes. One slated for next month is on solitary confinement.
Mr. Weschler fostered "a wondrously generative" mix of fellows, says Ellen Handler Spitz, a professor of visual arts at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and a six-year fellow at the institute.
Even as he held his full-time position, Mr. Weschler was involved in an impressive range of other activities; from 2006 to 2010, for example, he also directed the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Now he is seeking fellowships and residencies, intent on writing a new book on class, race, and violence in America.
Talk among fellows of, say, forming a breakaway institute outside NYU's control have quieted since September, when Mr. Weschler called for an assembly of fellows to find a constructive approach to the changes. He and 40 fellows worked on "devising a strategy moving forward," he said in an e-mail.
NYU administrators, too, are being conciliatory. John H. Beckman, vice president for public affairs, said via e-mail that Mr. Weschler "has done a superb job as the director of the institute, ... but at a good number of points in the institute's history, the director has been an NYU faculty member, and we expect to return to that construct." Mr. Weschler was a longtime writer at The New Yorker when he was appointed, in 2001.
"What form precisely the institute's work will take at that point, I cannot say," Mr. Beckman wrote." "That will be up to the new director to work out with the institute's fellows."
Some fellows remain skeptical about what's ahead. One of them, Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University who has worked at NYU and is the author of numerous books and of occasional essays in The Chronicle Review, said, "All institutions of that scale are opaque, and NYU is not low on the opacity scale."
October 1, 2012
Psychologist Brings Enthusiasm for Student Success to Troubled Ala. Chancellorship
Mark A. Heinrich has been named to lead the Alabama Community
College System—a troubled one that has been directed by six other
chancellors or interim chancellors since July 2006, when its then-chief
executive was fired. Greeting Mr. Heinrich's appointment, the editorial
board of The Birmingham News wrote: "If you're not a praying person, at least send Heinrich your best wishes. He will need all of them."
Mr. Heinrich, 59, says he has taken on the challenge because "I believe so strongly in the community-college system, the open-access concept—that it provides a route for really virtually anyone who's interested in postsecondary education."
He has already led an institution in the system through difficult times. In 2008, when Shelton State Community College was being visited repeatedly by federal investigators, he accepted the Alabama Board of Education's request to become the institution's president.
Announcing Mr. Heinrich's new appointment, Robert J. Bentley, who is both the Board of Education's president and the state's governor, said that seeing what Mr. Heinrich had managed to do at Shelton State demonstrated his capabilities. "His personality and the way he handles problems will show as he takes over the chancellorship," he said.
"Traumatizing," is how Mr. Heinrich describes the scandal he confronted at Shelton State. Theft charges brought in state court against the college's former president and a former dean were dismissed last year. But more than a dozen others connected with the two-year college system either pleaded guilty or were found guilty of various corruption charges in federal court. In 2008, the system's chancellor from 2002 to 2006, Roy W. Johnson Jr., pleaded guilty to taking nearly $1-million in kickbacks while in office.
Mr. Heinrich had seen trouble brewing; in 2001 he quit as Shelton State's dean of instruction after only six months. He had come to the campus from long service at Carson-Newman College, in Tennessee.
Regarding the crimes committed by community-college officials, Mr. Heinrich says: "When you dip into that behavior, everyone is hurt—students, faculty, and staff. It takes a while to get back on track."
His solution: "to make it known that everything is going to be according to the books. And that everyone is going to be fine."
Mr. Heinrich, who is a licensed psychologist, says his long experience tells him that "it's important that the people at your institution are treated properly and that you listen to them, because they have the answers, if you just listen."
His challenge as the system chancellor will be considerable. As the News's editorial board noted, each campus possesses "its own base of political power," which has often "been misused and abused."
Mr. Heinrich says that his priorities, fortunately, will build on system strengths. Those include work-force development, "a huge issue in the state of Alabama as business and industry are moving into the state in great numbers."
Persuading business and industry to bring the system relief from poor state higher-education budgets and reductions in federal student aid will be important, along with doing a better job of advising strapped students: "In many cases," he says, "students aren't even aware of funds for which they might qualify."
That includes the many thousands of military veterans who return to civilian life in Alabama. Mr. Heinrich says: "Helping them transition from work with the military into high-skilled, high-paid jobs is the kind of thing you live for as an educator."
Working smoothly with legislators is also among Mr. Heinrich's priorities, and among his accomplishments.
"We felt Mr. Heinrich was the best fit for Alabama," said Stephanie Bell, vice-president of the State Board of Education. His familiarity with the state helped; not only has he worked there, his doctorate is from the University of Alabama. And, she added, "he had a proven track record of going into a very difficult situation at a time when a lot of people would not even have considered the job."
Mr. Heinrich, 59, says he has taken on the challenge because "I believe so strongly in the community-college system, the open-access concept—that it provides a route for really virtually anyone who's interested in postsecondary education."
He has already led an institution in the system through difficult times. In 2008, when Shelton State Community College was being visited repeatedly by federal investigators, he accepted the Alabama Board of Education's request to become the institution's president.
Announcing Mr. Heinrich's new appointment, Robert J. Bentley, who is both the Board of Education's president and the state's governor, said that seeing what Mr. Heinrich had managed to do at Shelton State demonstrated his capabilities. "His personality and the way he handles problems will show as he takes over the chancellorship," he said.
"Traumatizing," is how Mr. Heinrich describes the scandal he confronted at Shelton State. Theft charges brought in state court against the college's former president and a former dean were dismissed last year. But more than a dozen others connected with the two-year college system either pleaded guilty or were found guilty of various corruption charges in federal court. In 2008, the system's chancellor from 2002 to 2006, Roy W. Johnson Jr., pleaded guilty to taking nearly $1-million in kickbacks while in office.
Mr. Heinrich had seen trouble brewing; in 2001 he quit as Shelton State's dean of instruction after only six months. He had come to the campus from long service at Carson-Newman College, in Tennessee.
Regarding the crimes committed by community-college officials, Mr. Heinrich says: "When you dip into that behavior, everyone is hurt—students, faculty, and staff. It takes a while to get back on track."
His solution: "to make it known that everything is going to be according to the books. And that everyone is going to be fine."
Mr. Heinrich, who is a licensed psychologist, says his long experience tells him that "it's important that the people at your institution are treated properly and that you listen to them, because they have the answers, if you just listen."
His challenge as the system chancellor will be considerable. As the News's editorial board noted, each campus possesses "its own base of political power," which has often "been misused and abused."
Mr. Heinrich says that his priorities, fortunately, will build on system strengths. Those include work-force development, "a huge issue in the state of Alabama as business and industry are moving into the state in great numbers."
Persuading business and industry to bring the system relief from poor state higher-education budgets and reductions in federal student aid will be important, along with doing a better job of advising strapped students: "In many cases," he says, "students aren't even aware of funds for which they might qualify."
That includes the many thousands of military veterans who return to civilian life in Alabama. Mr. Heinrich says: "Helping them transition from work with the military into high-skilled, high-paid jobs is the kind of thing you live for as an educator."
Working smoothly with legislators is also among Mr. Heinrich's priorities, and among his accomplishments.
"We felt Mr. Heinrich was the best fit for Alabama," said Stephanie Bell, vice-president of the State Board of Education. His familiarity with the state helped; not only has he worked there, his doctorate is from the University of Alabama. And, she added, "he had a proven track record of going into a very difficult situation at a time when a lot of people would not even have considered the job."
September 17, 2012
Anthropology's Great Advocate to Move On
Leading figures in the American Anthropological Association agree: William E. (Bill) Davis will be hard to replace.
He is stepping down as executive director, after 16 years at the head of the association, to concentrate on writing.
Past presidents praise him as an effective advocate of anthropology, and Mr. Davis in turn thanks the group's elected officials for being "tremendously encouraging and stimulating."
"I've been very comfortable with the boards," he says, "and I guess they've been comfortable with me, because I'm still here."
He was offered the post with the world's largest anthropological association—11,000 members—in 1996, despite never having worked in anthropology. He had, instead, completed his coursework and doctoral examinations at Syracuse University in political science. When a search firm identified him as a good candidate for the anthropology job, he was executive director of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations.
To put in place the association's first long-range plan, Mr. Davis had much to learn. "We were publishing 20 journals in paper and had limited circulation, primarily to academic libraries," he recalls. "Since then we've digitized 100 years of scholarship and are publishing 22 journals online, with tremendously increased access to the content around the world."
He proved skilled at working with the association's 38 autonomous constituent "sections" while containing costs, say past presidents. He also helped to ensure that the group retained control of its publications and their contents. That strategy, says Alan Goodman, president from 2005 to 2007, was intended to stem financial losses in the publishing program. "But it was really a decision about our intellectual future, too."
Mr. Davis also brought the lessons of anthropology to audiences outside of academe. "He was often a step ahead of the board—as in his vision of anthropology as a discipline that could serve the public," says Setha M. Low, who was president from 2007 to 2009. Since 2007 the association has had three traveling exhibitions about anthropological understandings of race, titled "Race: Are We So Different?"
The association dealt with some contentious episodes during Mr. Davis's tenure, including news reports that two American anthropologists had mistreated indigenous people in the Amazon, and a furor over the embedding of anthropologists with the U.S. military in the Middle East. The group's leaders generally agree that he came through those challenges well, a record that he attributes to "an almost continual discussion of what constitutes ethical conduct and behavior."
"He really nurtured the leadership but let us make our own decisions," says Mr. Goodman. "He knew as executive director that it was ultimately the members' association."
In addition to "extraordinary patience," Mr. Davis has exhibited a "really strong sense of practical politics," says Don Brenneis, who was the group's president from 2001 to 2003.
In recent years, about one-half of the discipline's Ph.D.'s have left academe for applied and practical jobs, but many of them continue to attend the association's conventions, as do an increasing number of anthropologists from other countries.
Under Mr. Davis, attendance at the meetings has swelled from 4,000 to 6,000. "That's great for the field," he says, "because it has much to offer the corporate, governmental, nonprofit, and museum worlds."
What now, for him?
"I don't plan on dying the day I retire," says Mr. Davis, 74, who will stay on the job until a replacement is found. He is writing a book about managing scholarly societies. Such groups are "a web of connective tissue" linking the varied work in their disciplines, he says, and are "very important to the whole enterprise of higher education."
He will be a hard act to follow, says Mr. Brenneis, who is a member of the search committee seeking a replacement. "One of the heartening things is that no one is expecting we'll have a Bill Davis again."
He is stepping down as executive director, after 16 years at the head of the association, to concentrate on writing.
Past presidents praise him as an effective advocate of anthropology, and Mr. Davis in turn thanks the group's elected officials for being "tremendously encouraging and stimulating."
"I've been very comfortable with the boards," he says, "and I guess they've been comfortable with me, because I'm still here."
He was offered the post with the world's largest anthropological association—11,000 members—in 1996, despite never having worked in anthropology. He had, instead, completed his coursework and doctoral examinations at Syracuse University in political science. When a search firm identified him as a good candidate for the anthropology job, he was executive director of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations.
To put in place the association's first long-range plan, Mr. Davis had much to learn. "We were publishing 20 journals in paper and had limited circulation, primarily to academic libraries," he recalls. "Since then we've digitized 100 years of scholarship and are publishing 22 journals online, with tremendously increased access to the content around the world."
He proved skilled at working with the association's 38 autonomous constituent "sections" while containing costs, say past presidents. He also helped to ensure that the group retained control of its publications and their contents. That strategy, says Alan Goodman, president from 2005 to 2007, was intended to stem financial losses in the publishing program. "But it was really a decision about our intellectual future, too."
Mr. Davis also brought the lessons of anthropology to audiences outside of academe. "He was often a step ahead of the board—as in his vision of anthropology as a discipline that could serve the public," says Setha M. Low, who was president from 2007 to 2009. Since 2007 the association has had three traveling exhibitions about anthropological understandings of race, titled "Race: Are We So Different?"
The association dealt with some contentious episodes during Mr. Davis's tenure, including news reports that two American anthropologists had mistreated indigenous people in the Amazon, and a furor over the embedding of anthropologists with the U.S. military in the Middle East. The group's leaders generally agree that he came through those challenges well, a record that he attributes to "an almost continual discussion of what constitutes ethical conduct and behavior."
"He really nurtured the leadership but let us make our own decisions," says Mr. Goodman. "He knew as executive director that it was ultimately the members' association."
In addition to "extraordinary patience," Mr. Davis has exhibited a "really strong sense of practical politics," says Don Brenneis, who was the group's president from 2001 to 2003.
In recent years, about one-half of the discipline's Ph.D.'s have left academe for applied and practical jobs, but many of them continue to attend the association's conventions, as do an increasing number of anthropologists from other countries.
Under Mr. Davis, attendance at the meetings has swelled from 4,000 to 6,000. "That's great for the field," he says, "because it has much to offer the corporate, governmental, nonprofit, and museum worlds."
What now, for him?
"I don't plan on dying the day I retire," says Mr. Davis, 74, who will stay on the job until a replacement is found. He is writing a book about managing scholarly societies. Such groups are "a web of connective tissue" linking the varied work in their disciplines, he says, and are "very important to the whole enterprise of higher education."
He will be a hard act to follow, says Mr. Brenneis, who is a member of the search committee seeking a replacement. "One of the heartening things is that no one is expecting we'll have a Bill Davis again."
September 10, 2012
What's Next in Online Learning? Stanford Names Vice Provost to Lead the Way
Linda A. Cicero, Stanford News Service
Stanford University has appointed its first vice provost for
online learning, signaling a further step in its efforts to extend its
educational reach beyond the classroom.
John C. Mitchell, 56, a professor of computer science at the university, was named to the new position late last month.
Stanford is known for having developed technological platforms for massive open online courses, or MOOC's. A year ago it offered three of them; some 450,000 people expressed interest, and tens of thousands completed the courses. "It was clear something really big was happening," says Mr. Mitchell, who is now responsible for figuring out where the institution should go from there.
His new position is only the third new vice-provostship Stanford has created in 20 years. That signals how seriously administrators take the emerging teaching-and-learning innovations, which they believe will transform their own students' educational experiences and lay the foundation for courses that can go global. "Our primary mission is to teach Stanford students," said the university's provost, John Etchemendy, in a written statement. "But it is also the university's mission to disseminate knowledge widely."
Mr. Mitchell will steer the large "Stanford Online" project, incorporating courses with computerized and online components. How extensive the offerings are—for example, whether the courses are videotaped in their entirety and put online—is up to individual instructors.
Three years ago, using his experience of working on safeguarding social-networking sites, he teamed up with colleagues to build a Web platform for courses and course component. Guided by advice from his computer-science students, Mr. Mitchell enhanced class participation by such means as streamlining the distribution of handouts.
Among his collaborators were Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, now on leave after creating a leading course-hosting company, Coursera.
Other MOOC-friendly platforms designed by Stanford faculty members are springing up. "So basically everyone else went out and started a company," Mr. Mitchell jokes, "and I'm the guy left here."
New, since the teaching-and-learning campaigns of, say, the 1980s and 90s, is students' comfort with communicating and forming online groups that "facilitate civilized and productive discussion, and courses that have a group-collaboration component," he says.
The ease of deploying such technological tools as small, inexpensive recording devices permits "a do-it-yourself operation to produce good-enough video," Mr. Mitchell says. He predicts that within five years, interactive video, social networking, and even laboratory-simulation course components "will be as prevalent on campus as, say, PowerPoint slides are now."
His advice: Think about what makes teaching more engaging and more fun for professors and students, wherever they are—in residence halls, the library, a coffee shop. "If I could reduce the number of hours per year I spend at a large lecture and have more time that I spend at a cafe with small groups of students, that would be more fun for me, and on balance it'd probably be more fun for the students, and everybody would be happier."
In Stanford's decentralized approach, individual instructors and departments will lead the way. Among Mr. Mitchell's jobs will be to help faculty members and students make sense of the new tools, and use them to create and take new kinds of courses. Another task is to spread the word about those offerings. A Web site will provide such resources as forums where users of the new tools can trade ideas.
"Everybody here is really psyched," he says. That's in part because "a new way of organizing our teaching gives us a good opportunity to rethink what we're doing."
Also encouraging involvement is the promise of "off-campus distribution at scale" in professors' quest for recognition of their research and teaching. Mr. Mitchell is confident that colleagues near and far will share at least one conviction: "Every hour we can take away from Angry Birds and turn into a learning experience is probably a good thing."
John C. Mitchell, 56, a professor of computer science at the university, was named to the new position late last month.
Stanford is known for having developed technological platforms for massive open online courses, or MOOC's. A year ago it offered three of them; some 450,000 people expressed interest, and tens of thousands completed the courses. "It was clear something really big was happening," says Mr. Mitchell, who is now responsible for figuring out where the institution should go from there.
His new position is only the third new vice-provostship Stanford has created in 20 years. That signals how seriously administrators take the emerging teaching-and-learning innovations, which they believe will transform their own students' educational experiences and lay the foundation for courses that can go global. "Our primary mission is to teach Stanford students," said the university's provost, John Etchemendy, in a written statement. "But it is also the university's mission to disseminate knowledge widely."
Mr. Mitchell will steer the large "Stanford Online" project, incorporating courses with computerized and online components. How extensive the offerings are—for example, whether the courses are videotaped in their entirety and put online—is up to individual instructors.
Three years ago, using his experience of working on safeguarding social-networking sites, he teamed up with colleagues to build a Web platform for courses and course component. Guided by advice from his computer-science students, Mr. Mitchell enhanced class participation by such means as streamlining the distribution of handouts.
Among his collaborators were Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, now on leave after creating a leading course-hosting company, Coursera.
Other MOOC-friendly platforms designed by Stanford faculty members are springing up. "So basically everyone else went out and started a company," Mr. Mitchell jokes, "and I'm the guy left here."
Connecting With Students
More seriously, he says, "I'm interested in how all of this online learning and teaching, which is almost a revolution now, affects how we connect with our students, provide effective experiences off campus, and where this will all take us."New, since the teaching-and-learning campaigns of, say, the 1980s and 90s, is students' comfort with communicating and forming online groups that "facilitate civilized and productive discussion, and courses that have a group-collaboration component," he says.
The ease of deploying such technological tools as small, inexpensive recording devices permits "a do-it-yourself operation to produce good-enough video," Mr. Mitchell says. He predicts that within five years, interactive video, social networking, and even laboratory-simulation course components "will be as prevalent on campus as, say, PowerPoint slides are now."
His advice: Think about what makes teaching more engaging and more fun for professors and students, wherever they are—in residence halls, the library, a coffee shop. "If I could reduce the number of hours per year I spend at a large lecture and have more time that I spend at a cafe with small groups of students, that would be more fun for me, and on balance it'd probably be more fun for the students, and everybody would be happier."
In Stanford's decentralized approach, individual instructors and departments will lead the way. Among Mr. Mitchell's jobs will be to help faculty members and students make sense of the new tools, and use them to create and take new kinds of courses. Another task is to spread the word about those offerings. A Web site will provide such resources as forums where users of the new tools can trade ideas.
"Everybody here is really psyched," he says. That's in part because "a new way of organizing our teaching gives us a good opportunity to rethink what we're doing."
Also encouraging involvement is the promise of "off-campus distribution at scale" in professors' quest for recognition of their research and teaching. Mr. Mitchell is confident that colleagues near and far will share at least one conviction: "Every hour we can take away from Angry Birds and turn into a learning experience is probably a good thing."
September 3, 2012
UCLA Beefs Up Environmental Humanities With 3 Hires From Stanford
Three researchers of environmental and digital humanities are
moving from Stanford University to the University of California at Los
Angeles this month as part of their new institution's push into the
emerging field.
Jon Christensen, Allison Carruth, and Ursula K. Heise say they are making the move from a well-endowed private institution to one hit hard by state budget cuts because UCLA was willing to make a cluster hire to advance its expansion into environmental humanities.
"UCLA is a great public university, with a visionary Institute of the Environment and Sustainability," says Mr. Christensen, who along with Ms. Heise is joining the institute. The university clearly wishes to "reinvent how we study the crucial environmental issues of our time," he says.
Since 2009, Mr. Christensen has directed Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the American West, where he has worked since its founding in 2002. He has also been the principal investigator there of the Spatial History Project and the City Nature digital-humanities project, both of which use computerized analyses of data like maps, demographic records, historical narratives, and social media to create visual aids for understanding history.
At UCLA, he will teach courses that bring historical and other humanities perspectives to environmental challenges and policy making. In his teaching, he deals with such issues as the increased incidence of forest fires, the shrinking of water supplies, and the loss of animal and plant species by using not just scientific, historical, and environmental research, but also, for example, published narratives and even fiction and science fiction that relate to human adaptation and its possible futures. He has also brought such issues to the attention of the public in his 30 years as an environmental and science writer. He has contributed to many publications, including The New York Times and High Country News, and has been interviewed on radio and television programs.
Now 52, he is completing a dissertation and book that trace a "history of thinking with things in nature" by contemplating relationships among an eminent conservationist biologist, Paul R. Ehrlich; an insect, the Bay checkerspot butterfly; a plant, the California dwarf plantain; and a mineral, serpentine. That seeming specificity belies Mr. Christensen's intentions. "I'm interested in looking at the American West as a place where many global processes and phenomena and history are worked out," he says. At UCLA, he becomes an adjunct assistant professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and in the history department.
Private donors, as well as the institute and various university divisions, are footing the bill for the new hires. Their motivation is simple, says Glen M. MacDonald, the institute's director: All realize the importance of exploring and communicating ideas about sustainability.
Faculty members around campus have demonstrated that they share that awareness, he adds. As have students. In the six years that the institute has offered a bachelor of science degree in environmental sciences that combines science, policy, and communications perspectives, enrollments have jumped from four to 280. "We envisioned we would have maybe 30 students for that because it's so hard," says Mr. MacDonald.
In addition, the institute has an undergraduate minor in environmental systems and society with 150 students, a doctoral program in environmental sciences and engineering with 22 students, and a leaders-in-sustainability graduate certificate with 189 graduate students from across campus, many from the business school.
A compelling draw of the institute for Mr. Christensen and Ms. Heise was its emphasis on digital humanities. Mr. Christensen uses such techniques as digitally overlaying historical maps to visualize environmental changes over time, as well as "text mining," a method of detecting patterns of ideas across thousands of texts.
Ms. Heise, also 52, becomes a professor of English at UCLA with a joint appointment in Mr. MacDonald's institute. A literary scholar who founded the Environmental Humanities Project at Stanford, she studies databases of levels of endangerment of biological species. Those databases, she says, are an expression of a "desire to grasp the whole" akin to literary epics that sought to express communities' entire worlds.
Ms. Carruth, 36, becomes an assistant professor of English at UCLA. She is a specialist in post-1945 American literature and cultural representations of food. Fortunately, she says, the interdisciplinary study of environmental humanities has established itself to the point that specialist academic positions are now being advertised. "The last five years have opened up the conversation about the role of the humanities in examining environmental histories and crises," she says.
Los Angeles might seem an unlikely place for the new hires' field to take off. But Mr. Christensen insists that it is "a vibrant laboratory for studying environmental phenomena." The city is, for example, trying to become a showcase for the improvement of air quality in the world's megacities through such projects as the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan and the region's Long Range Transportation Plan for its transport systems.
Arguably, says Mr. MacDonald, Los Angeles is "both the poster child for environmental challenges in sustainability and a place the world looks to for solutions."
Jon Christensen, Allison Carruth, and Ursula K. Heise say they are making the move from a well-endowed private institution to one hit hard by state budget cuts because UCLA was willing to make a cluster hire to advance its expansion into environmental humanities.
"UCLA is a great public university, with a visionary Institute of the Environment and Sustainability," says Mr. Christensen, who along with Ms. Heise is joining the institute. The university clearly wishes to "reinvent how we study the crucial environmental issues of our time," he says.
Since 2009, Mr. Christensen has directed Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the American West, where he has worked since its founding in 2002. He has also been the principal investigator there of the Spatial History Project and the City Nature digital-humanities project, both of which use computerized analyses of data like maps, demographic records, historical narratives, and social media to create visual aids for understanding history.
At UCLA, he will teach courses that bring historical and other humanities perspectives to environmental challenges and policy making. In his teaching, he deals with such issues as the increased incidence of forest fires, the shrinking of water supplies, and the loss of animal and plant species by using not just scientific, historical, and environmental research, but also, for example, published narratives and even fiction and science fiction that relate to human adaptation and its possible futures. He has also brought such issues to the attention of the public in his 30 years as an environmental and science writer. He has contributed to many publications, including The New York Times and High Country News, and has been interviewed on radio and television programs.
Now 52, he is completing a dissertation and book that trace a "history of thinking with things in nature" by contemplating relationships among an eminent conservationist biologist, Paul R. Ehrlich; an insect, the Bay checkerspot butterfly; a plant, the California dwarf plantain; and a mineral, serpentine. That seeming specificity belies Mr. Christensen's intentions. "I'm interested in looking at the American West as a place where many global processes and phenomena and history are worked out," he says. At UCLA, he becomes an adjunct assistant professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and in the history department.
Private donors, as well as the institute and various university divisions, are footing the bill for the new hires. Their motivation is simple, says Glen M. MacDonald, the institute's director: All realize the importance of exploring and communicating ideas about sustainability.
Faculty members around campus have demonstrated that they share that awareness, he adds. As have students. In the six years that the institute has offered a bachelor of science degree in environmental sciences that combines science, policy, and communications perspectives, enrollments have jumped from four to 280. "We envisioned we would have maybe 30 students for that because it's so hard," says Mr. MacDonald.
In addition, the institute has an undergraduate minor in environmental systems and society with 150 students, a doctoral program in environmental sciences and engineering with 22 students, and a leaders-in-sustainability graduate certificate with 189 graduate students from across campus, many from the business school.
A compelling draw of the institute for Mr. Christensen and Ms. Heise was its emphasis on digital humanities. Mr. Christensen uses such techniques as digitally overlaying historical maps to visualize environmental changes over time, as well as "text mining," a method of detecting patterns of ideas across thousands of texts.
Ms. Heise, also 52, becomes a professor of English at UCLA with a joint appointment in Mr. MacDonald's institute. A literary scholar who founded the Environmental Humanities Project at Stanford, she studies databases of levels of endangerment of biological species. Those databases, she says, are an expression of a "desire to grasp the whole" akin to literary epics that sought to express communities' entire worlds.
Ms. Carruth, 36, becomes an assistant professor of English at UCLA. She is a specialist in post-1945 American literature and cultural representations of food. Fortunately, she says, the interdisciplinary study of environmental humanities has established itself to the point that specialist academic positions are now being advertised. "The last five years have opened up the conversation about the role of the humanities in examining environmental histories and crises," she says.
Los Angeles might seem an unlikely place for the new hires' field to take off. But Mr. Christensen insists that it is "a vibrant laboratory for studying environmental phenomena." The city is, for example, trying to become a showcase for the improvement of air quality in the world's megacities through such projects as the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan and the region's Long Range Transportation Plan for its transport systems.
Arguably, says Mr. MacDonald, Los Angeles is "both the poster child for environmental challenges in sustainability and a place the world looks to for solutions."
September 3, 2012
New Dean Hopes to Heighten Wilson School's Influence on Policy
Many prominent thinkers work in the offices of Princeton
University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Starting this month, it will be Cecilia E. Rouse's job to manage all 80 of them.
"It'll be interesting," says Ms. Rouse, with a laugh. She is taking over as dean of the school, where she has taught and conducted research for 20 years. "But I'm not a dictator. I've always viewed the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School as a facilitator who helps the faculty work together as a community."
The faculty includes the well-known economists Paul Krugman and Alan B. Krueger, and the political scientists G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter.
Ms. Rouse, 48, brings to the job a reputation for top-flight research in labor economics as it relates to education policy making. She is founding director of the Princeton Education Research Section, an interdisciplinary unit that promotes the use of research in such policy making. She has also worked at high levels of government service. From 2009 to 2011 she was one of three members of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. From 1998 to 1999 she served the White House on the National Economic Council.
At Princeton, Ms. Rouse has most recently held a named professorship in the economics of education. She came to the university in 1992 as a freshly minted Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. Her research topics have included the economic benefits of community-college attendance, the effect of private-school voucher programs on student achievement, and the impact outcomes of "blind" auditions on the hiring of women as symphony-orchestra members (she is herself a longtime flutist).
She also has written influentially on shortcomings at various levels of education, and on the effects of student-loan debt on the career choices of college graduates.
Making education loans affordable and informing borrowers of the risks are government responsibilities, she says. "We don't want students to go bankrupt because they have not done so well in realizing what the risks of investing in education are." Nor should students be discouraged from going into public-sector jobs because of the pressure to earn a high income to repay student loans, she says.
Ms. Rouse grew up as the daughter of a research physicist and a school psychologist. Both her siblings are academics. Though she says she wasn't aiming for the dean position, an invitation by the search committee to apply for the post rekindled her aspiration to be involved in academic administration.
She sees two major tasks ahead. The first is to consolidate changes in the Wilson School's undergraduate curriculum that were shepherded in by the former dean, Christina Paxson, who is now president of Brown University.
Also on her agenda is to bolster the influence of Wilson School research on policy making. Whether or not faculty members spend time in Washington, as she did, their challenge remains the same: to reach interested audiences, at national and local levels.
For example, she asks, what is the best way to inject scholarly research into policy circles, and "how do you get information to parents about issues that are important for their children?" A model she has in mind is the one she and colleagues at the Wilson School and the Brookings Institution adopted when they started the journal The Future of Children, in 2005. In overviews of pressing topics, and at conferences for educational practitioners, she says, the priority of the journal's editors has been "to highlight the critical issues, and to write about them in a very accessible way."
"It'll be interesting," says Ms. Rouse, with a laugh. She is taking over as dean of the school, where she has taught and conducted research for 20 years. "But I'm not a dictator. I've always viewed the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School as a facilitator who helps the faculty work together as a community."
The faculty includes the well-known economists Paul Krugman and Alan B. Krueger, and the political scientists G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter.
Ms. Rouse, 48, brings to the job a reputation for top-flight research in labor economics as it relates to education policy making. She is founding director of the Princeton Education Research Section, an interdisciplinary unit that promotes the use of research in such policy making. She has also worked at high levels of government service. From 2009 to 2011 she was one of three members of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. From 1998 to 1999 she served the White House on the National Economic Council.
At Princeton, Ms. Rouse has most recently held a named professorship in the economics of education. She came to the university in 1992 as a freshly minted Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. Her research topics have included the economic benefits of community-college attendance, the effect of private-school voucher programs on student achievement, and the impact outcomes of "blind" auditions on the hiring of women as symphony-orchestra members (she is herself a longtime flutist).
She also has written influentially on shortcomings at various levels of education, and on the effects of student-loan debt on the career choices of college graduates.
Making education loans affordable and informing borrowers of the risks are government responsibilities, she says. "We don't want students to go bankrupt because they have not done so well in realizing what the risks of investing in education are." Nor should students be discouraged from going into public-sector jobs because of the pressure to earn a high income to repay student loans, she says.
Ms. Rouse grew up as the daughter of a research physicist and a school psychologist. Both her siblings are academics. Though she says she wasn't aiming for the dean position, an invitation by the search committee to apply for the post rekindled her aspiration to be involved in academic administration.
She sees two major tasks ahead. The first is to consolidate changes in the Wilson School's undergraduate curriculum that were shepherded in by the former dean, Christina Paxson, who is now president of Brown University.
Also on her agenda is to bolster the influence of Wilson School research on policy making. Whether or not faculty members spend time in Washington, as she did, their challenge remains the same: to reach interested audiences, at national and local levels.
For example, she asks, what is the best way to inject scholarly research into policy circles, and "how do you get information to parents about issues that are important for their children?" A model she has in mind is the one she and colleagues at the Wilson School and the Brookings Institution adopted when they started the journal The Future of Children, in 2005. In overviews of pressing topics, and at conferences for educational practitioners, she says, the priority of the journal's editors has been "to highlight the critical issues, and to write about them in a very accessible way."
August 13, 2012
5 Professors Join Vanderbilt's Bid to Bridge Health and Society
While studying for his medical degree at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, Jonathan M. Metzl also completed bachelor's degrees in biology and English literature.
Understandably, he recalls, "pretty much everyone said, 'What the hell are you doing?'"
Undaunted by such questions, during his medical residency at Stanford University he earned a master's degree in literature. While establishing a practice in psychiatry, he earned a doctorate in cultural studies from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
That breadth of study prepared him to become, last year, the director of Vanderbilt University's Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. To cope with swelling interest, the center has recently hired its first five core faculty members.
Some 335 students are now pursuing majors through the center, which has evolved from an interdepartmental program of teaching and research begun in 2006. They are learning about how medical health, policy, and practice intersect with cultural, social, economic, and political forces.
Until now, the program has coordinated courses taught by some 50 Vanderbilt faculty members in subjects as diverse as economics, ethics, literature, ethnomusicology, and obstetrics. The center focuses on undergraduate teaching, in many cases to students headed for careers in medicine or public health. But Dr. Metzl and his staff are venturing into other parts of the university, including its law and medical schools. By his estimate, some 20 percent of Vanderbilt medical students take courses listed by the center.
Around the country, interest is booming in interdisciplinary approaches to health and medicine, says Dr. Metzl, 46, whose own research focuses on the history of psychiatry, race, and gender. Nationwide, he says, medical-school administrators are acknowledging that "the skill sets that doctors need is changing to incorporate more critical thinking, and more social awareness."
His center's five openings attracted thousands of applicants, and those took a year to sift through.
Among the successful candidates is Amy L. Non, 30, a molecular anthropologist who in the fall will begin as an assistant professor at the center and in the anthropology department. She will teach, and continue her research into the effects that genetic ancestry and social and cultural factors have on racial disparities in the incidence of hypertension. Since earning a master's degree in public health and a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Florida, she has been a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation fellow at Harvard University's Center for Population and Development Studies. While at Harvard, she says, "I was concerned I wouldn't find a department that was bringing together social scientists, physicians, and bench scientists to tackle these kinds of problems. The tradition in most disciplines is that people are trained in one discipline, and then they stay in it."
Another of the new hires, Derek M. Griffith, 41, believes that by being open to the complexities of health phenomena, researchers can devise better research questionnaires, he says. Mr. Griffith has moved to Nashville from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he was director of the Center on Men's Health Disparities and assistant director of the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture, and Health. He says the "beauty" of Vanderbilt's center is that it has "a diverse team of folks looking at things from various perspectives, taking lessons from literature, and history, and from qualitative approaches, and from talking to folks."
The last has proved particularly beneficial, he says. Participatory-research projects by civil-rights and AIDS activists—"efforts that grew organically out of the communities where the problems were occurring"—have influenced both health policy and the provision of care.
Joining Ms. Non and Mr. Griffith as new hires at the Vanderbilt center are three others.
Dominique P. Béhague, 42, has moved from Britain's Brunel University to become an associate professor at the center. She studies the intersections of psychiatry, reproductive health, and the politics of global health research.
Kenneth T. MacLeish, 33, a recent anthropology Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin and a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, has been appointed an assistant professor at the Vanderbilt center. He studies how wars affect the everyday lives of soldiers, their families, and their communities, the subject of his forthcoming book from Princeton University Press.
Laura Stark, 36, now an assistant professor at Vanderbilt, studies medicine, morality, and the modern state, and is the author of Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research (University of Chicago Press, 2012). She has been an assistant professor of sociology in the Program in Science in Society at Wesleyan University.
June 18, 2012
Understandably, he recalls, "pretty much everyone said, 'What the hell are you doing?'"
Undaunted by such questions, during his medical residency at Stanford University he earned a master's degree in literature. While establishing a practice in psychiatry, he earned a doctorate in cultural studies from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
That breadth of study prepared him to become, last year, the director of Vanderbilt University's Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. To cope with swelling interest, the center has recently hired its first five core faculty members.
Some 335 students are now pursuing majors through the center, which has evolved from an interdepartmental program of teaching and research begun in 2006. They are learning about how medical health, policy, and practice intersect with cultural, social, economic, and political forces.
Until now, the program has coordinated courses taught by some 50 Vanderbilt faculty members in subjects as diverse as economics, ethics, literature, ethnomusicology, and obstetrics. The center focuses on undergraduate teaching, in many cases to students headed for careers in medicine or public health. But Dr. Metzl and his staff are venturing into other parts of the university, including its law and medical schools. By his estimate, some 20 percent of Vanderbilt medical students take courses listed by the center.
Around the country, interest is booming in interdisciplinary approaches to health and medicine, says Dr. Metzl, 46, whose own research focuses on the history of psychiatry, race, and gender. Nationwide, he says, medical-school administrators are acknowledging that "the skill sets that doctors need is changing to incorporate more critical thinking, and more social awareness."
His center's five openings attracted thousands of applicants, and those took a year to sift through.
Among the successful candidates is Amy L. Non, 30, a molecular anthropologist who in the fall will begin as an assistant professor at the center and in the anthropology department. She will teach, and continue her research into the effects that genetic ancestry and social and cultural factors have on racial disparities in the incidence of hypertension. Since earning a master's degree in public health and a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Florida, she has been a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation fellow at Harvard University's Center for Population and Development Studies. While at Harvard, she says, "I was concerned I wouldn't find a department that was bringing together social scientists, physicians, and bench scientists to tackle these kinds of problems. The tradition in most disciplines is that people are trained in one discipline, and then they stay in it."
Another of the new hires, Derek M. Griffith, 41, believes that by being open to the complexities of health phenomena, researchers can devise better research questionnaires, he says. Mr. Griffith has moved to Nashville from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he was director of the Center on Men's Health Disparities and assistant director of the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture, and Health. He says the "beauty" of Vanderbilt's center is that it has "a diverse team of folks looking at things from various perspectives, taking lessons from literature, and history, and from qualitative approaches, and from talking to folks."
The last has proved particularly beneficial, he says. Participatory-research projects by civil-rights and AIDS activists—"efforts that grew organically out of the communities where the problems were occurring"—have influenced both health policy and the provision of care.
Joining Ms. Non and Mr. Griffith as new hires at the Vanderbilt center are three others.
Dominique P. Béhague, 42, has moved from Britain's Brunel University to become an associate professor at the center. She studies the intersections of psychiatry, reproductive health, and the politics of global health research.
Kenneth T. MacLeish, 33, a recent anthropology Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin and a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, has been appointed an assistant professor at the Vanderbilt center. He studies how wars affect the everyday lives of soldiers, their families, and their communities, the subject of his forthcoming book from Princeton University Press.
Laura Stark, 36, now an assistant professor at Vanderbilt, studies medicine, morality, and the modern state, and is the author of Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research (University of Chicago Press, 2012). She has been an assistant professor of sociology in the Program in Science in Society at Wesleyan University.
July 30, 2012
Much-Watched Couple in Economics Lands at U. of Michigan
Sarah Miller
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, a
high-profile economist couple, have just chosen to move to the
University of Michigan, one of several institutions in the running.
From the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, they take to Ann Arbor this fall their reputations for using economics and other social sciences to frame insights into many areas of modern life.
"We've been together through our entire academic careers, and both our careers are equally important," Mr. Wolfers says. That he and Ms. Stevenson constantly publish together is so well known in economics circles that few department chairs would have dreamed of getting one and not the other. "We said we'd choose the university where the combination of jobs was best for us jointly," he says.
After all, their most publicly visible specialty is the life of families: marriages, divorce, child-rearing. Some call it "lovenomics."
Mr. Wolfers, 39, has been an associate professor of business and public policy at Wharton, and at Michigan becomes a professor of economics and public policy. Ms. Stevenson, who has just turned 41, becomes an associate professor of public policy.
They leave Philadelphia after four years, although each was often elsewhere. Both, for example, were visiting faculty members at Princeton University in the 2011-12 academic year. Among Mr. Wolfers's many appointments is one as nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
From September 2010 to September 2011, Ms. Stevenson worked as chief economist at the Department of Labor.
She became interested in the impact of public policy on the labor market, especially on women and families, while studying economics at Wellesley College. She then completed a doctorate in economics at Harvard University.
There she met Mr. Wolfers, who was enrolled on a Fulbright scholarship. The former star economics student at the University of Sydney had worked at Australia's central bank.
From the outset, his interests were varied—he has, for example, long studied racial discrimination and other features of sports, an echo, he says, of his brief adolescent apprenticeship to a Sydney bookie.
Some of the couple's findings are surprising, including that men are growing happier and women unhappier, and that the American divorce rate has been falling for decades.
As it happens, Mr. Wolfers and Ms. Stevenson would not qualify for their own survey sample because they are not married. Their reasons include the "marriage penalty" that the tax code imposes on married couples when both work and the inequity of bars on non-heterosexual marriage. In any case, they say, their 3-year-old daughter binds them more strongly than any marriage license.
After "running regressions" of data and finding that having children lowers couples' contentment, they went ahead anyway. They named their first Matilda, a nod to Mr. Wolfers's homeland, and expect a second child in October.
In economics journals, as in popular venues like Bloomberg News and Freakonomics.com, Stevenson & Wolfers do not shy from holding forth on such controversies as the efficacy of the death penalty—none demonstrated—or the distortion of economic data by almost all political operatives. No surprise, then, that the couple is much courted by the popular press, nor that that attention has provoked collegial chatter, some of it snarky. So, too, did the unexpected news, last year, that Ms. Stevenson's Wharton department had denied her tenure. Michigan assessed her work differently and is hiring her to a tenured position.
Senior colleagues approve their move. "My sense is, it's great for them and for Michigan," says Harvard's N. Gregory Mankiw, a leading economist who taught Mr. Wolfers and Ms. Stevenson. "They're very promising young economists, and Michigan is a great department."
Plus, he says, Ann Arbor is a good place to raise children.
Being able to live near campus will, says Ms. Stevenson, free up time for teaching, writing, and public appearances. She and Mr. Wolfers will no longer need a driver. They hired one for their two hours of daily commuting between Philadelphia to Princeton, having calculated that that would optimize their output and contentment.
From the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, they take to Ann Arbor this fall their reputations for using economics and other social sciences to frame insights into many areas of modern life.
"We've been together through our entire academic careers, and both our careers are equally important," Mr. Wolfers says. That he and Ms. Stevenson constantly publish together is so well known in economics circles that few department chairs would have dreamed of getting one and not the other. "We said we'd choose the university where the combination of jobs was best for us jointly," he says.
After all, their most publicly visible specialty is the life of families: marriages, divorce, child-rearing. Some call it "lovenomics."
Mr. Wolfers, 39, has been an associate professor of business and public policy at Wharton, and at Michigan becomes a professor of economics and public policy. Ms. Stevenson, who has just turned 41, becomes an associate professor of public policy.
They leave Philadelphia after four years, although each was often elsewhere. Both, for example, were visiting faculty members at Princeton University in the 2011-12 academic year. Among Mr. Wolfers's many appointments is one as nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
From September 2010 to September 2011, Ms. Stevenson worked as chief economist at the Department of Labor.
She became interested in the impact of public policy on the labor market, especially on women and families, while studying economics at Wellesley College. She then completed a doctorate in economics at Harvard University.
There she met Mr. Wolfers, who was enrolled on a Fulbright scholarship. The former star economics student at the University of Sydney had worked at Australia's central bank.
From the outset, his interests were varied—he has, for example, long studied racial discrimination and other features of sports, an echo, he says, of his brief adolescent apprenticeship to a Sydney bookie.
Some of the couple's findings are surprising, including that men are growing happier and women unhappier, and that the American divorce rate has been falling for decades.
As it happens, Mr. Wolfers and Ms. Stevenson would not qualify for their own survey sample because they are not married. Their reasons include the "marriage penalty" that the tax code imposes on married couples when both work and the inequity of bars on non-heterosexual marriage. In any case, they say, their 3-year-old daughter binds them more strongly than any marriage license.
After "running regressions" of data and finding that having children lowers couples' contentment, they went ahead anyway. They named their first Matilda, a nod to Mr. Wolfers's homeland, and expect a second child in October.
In economics journals, as in popular venues like Bloomberg News and Freakonomics.com, Stevenson & Wolfers do not shy from holding forth on such controversies as the efficacy of the death penalty—none demonstrated—or the distortion of economic data by almost all political operatives. No surprise, then, that the couple is much courted by the popular press, nor that that attention has provoked collegial chatter, some of it snarky. So, too, did the unexpected news, last year, that Ms. Stevenson's Wharton department had denied her tenure. Michigan assessed her work differently and is hiring her to a tenured position.
Senior colleagues approve their move. "My sense is, it's great for them and for Michigan," says Harvard's N. Gregory Mankiw, a leading economist who taught Mr. Wolfers and Ms. Stevenson. "They're very promising young economists, and Michigan is a great department."
Plus, he says, Ann Arbor is a good place to raise children.
Being able to live near campus will, says Ms. Stevenson, free up time for teaching, writing, and public appearances. She and Mr. Wolfers will no longer need a driver. They hired one for their two hours of daily commuting between Philadelphia to Princeton, having calculated that that would optimize their output and contentment.
June 18, 2012
Neuroscientist Finds a Campus That Embraces the Intersection of Science and Art
Siddharth Ramakrishnan
Age: 33
New job: Assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Puget Sound and first holder of a chair in that field, endowed by the prominent biochemist Marvin H. Caruthers
Position he's leaving: Researcher in the Bioelectronics Systems Lab in the electrical-engineering department of Columbia University
Highest degree: Ph.D. in neuroscience, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2005
As a postdoc, I did research at UCLA on zebra-fish development. At some point—it was one of those days when you're happy if your experiment works, unhappy if it doesn't—it felt like I was in a selfish microcosm.
Two things happened that week. One, I went out to a party where the people who met me could not believe that I, a fun and animated person, could be a scientist. I realized there is a huge divide between what people perceive happens in the sciences and what actually happens. A lot of cool people are doing really interesting stuff in their labs. The other was I met the UCLA nanoscientist Jim Gimzewski, who introduced me to Victoria Vesna, a multimedia artist who directs the UCLA Art|Sci Center.
Our conversations led to collaborations on art exhibitions founded in scientific topics like Hox genes and olfactory umwelts. Through art, I hope we are breaking the accessibility barrier to science. In the small Art|Sci community, I've talked to researchers who have contemplated working as artists but realized it's more amenable to make a living working as scientists. And a lot of artists I've met have thought about going into the sciences at one point. There seems to be a penchant for both inside a lot of us.
I wondered how to balance being a scientist while whetting my creativity within Art|Science and have deferred to Professor Gimzewski's advice that it's tough, but you just need to keep creating and something will come out of it. Some researchers do laugh at you, but more and more young scientists are excited about collaborating with artists.
I think the culture is emerging to where it's OK to talk about it.
For the last three years I've been at Columbia University, creating hybrid neural-electronic devices, biosensors, and biobatteries. Last fall I applied for the position at the University of Puget Sound. When I went there for interviews, I didn't have to hide anything. Every single faculty member I met made a point of asking me, "So tell me about your art work. How can I be involved?" It's a place where the liberal arts and sciences truly seem to be together.
The neuroscience program at Puget Sound developed a few years ago, when some faculty from biology, occupational therapy, and psychology came together and volunteered to develop some courses in neuroscience. What they created has blossomed, and they wanted a more dedicated position to take it further.
I've really missed the classroom while working in big research institutions, and have had to teach on the side, both at UCLA and the New School for Design. I was excited to see the inquiry-based learning at Puget Sound, and the curiosity and enthusiasm of the students.
Apart from the core neuroscience curricula, I also hope to develop interdisciplinary classes in art and science after my appointment begins, in January. The professorship has some money for a small research facility. In October I'll start setting up my research lab to examine neuroendocrine systems in zebra fish.
I've had these disparate but interesting things I've done, all of which I am passionate about, and this is the first time I can use all the things I do in one job.
Mr. Subbaswamy used the quote in his address to the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in March, during his visit as one of four finalists to be chancellor.
He got the nod, and is set to take office on July 1.
It is clear during an interview that his enthusiasm for Jefferson's remark was not just candidate shtick. "That's really what public education is about," he says of Jefferson's dream of broad access. "And public universities are one of the greatest assets of this country."
Mr. Subbaswamy, who is 61, will arrive on the campus to "a lot of good will," says Max Page, a professor of architecture and history at Amherst who leads Phenom, a group that lobbies for public higher education in the state. "He was the far-and-wide consensus choice among all the campus groups."
Mr. Subbaswamy will be Amherst's fourth chancellor in 11 years, and the successor to Robert C. Holub, who leaves after four years amid some bad blood over his leadership style. "There is such a desire now to have someone who lasts," says Mr. Page. "His sense of humor and his manner will be valuable."
Ralph W. Whitehead, a professor of journalism who sat on a faculty committee that met the four finalists, agrees. An hourlong interview of Mr. Subbaswamy became "a free sample of his leadership style," he says. "Even though he was a job applicant, he didn't pander. He was very straightforward but also willing to listen to views other than his own."
Mr. Subbaswamy told the panel, with infectious enthusiasm, that he planned to improve enrollment access and cost containment, increase faculty hiring and the number of doctorates awarded, and better collaborate with the other four institutions of the Massachusetts system—pretty much everything on a campus leader's agenda, and all of it straightaway. He has excelled before, in such areas as fund raising and retention, and says: "At UMass, I'll have a great foundation to build on because those are all elements in which there's been demonstrable commitment and progress over the last four or five years."
In lobbying state political leaders for more support, Mr. Subbaswamy will be helped by his personable nature—"Please, call me Swamy," he tells people—but also by a growing sense that the state, like so many others, must find a more sustainable model of higher-education financing. "What is being called the new normal requires new approaches, entrepreneurship, an international outlook," he says. "I certainly believe in those and have a great deal of experience in bringing about progress through collaboration."
He has the strong support of the system's new president, Robert L. Caret, a chemist, who has praised Mr. Subbaswamy for his experience, vision, intellect, and drive.
Mr. Subbaswamy's experience includes three- to six-year stints as dean of arts and sciences at the University of Miami and at Indiana University at Bloomington, and, most recently, as provost of the University of Kentucky. He was raised in and around Bangalore, India, and came to the United States in 1971 for his doctoral studies in physics at Bloomington.
Among challenges he will face at Amherst is the institution's continuing bid to be invited to join the prestigious, 61-member Association of American Universities. He says that "to the extent it is a club," with its own complex deliberations and agendas, all an aspiring institution can do is ensure that "our quality screams at them and says, We're of the same quality—if not even better—than some of the members."
He says speaking frankly like that is the basis of his approach to campus diplomacy: "I find that in the beginning it causes a bit of shock, but in the end, once people see that I speak my mind and there is no hidden agenda, that works quite well."
During his candidate's speech on the campus, in response to a question about perceptions that the administration was too large and costly, he said he would remedy that by appointing an assistant chancellor to streamline it. The audience responded with laughter and applause.
Age: 33
New job: Assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Puget Sound and first holder of a chair in that field, endowed by the prominent biochemist Marvin H. Caruthers
Position he's leaving: Researcher in the Bioelectronics Systems Lab in the electrical-engineering department of Columbia University
Highest degree: Ph.D. in neuroscience, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2005
As a postdoc, I did research at UCLA on zebra-fish development. At some point—it was one of those days when you're happy if your experiment works, unhappy if it doesn't—it felt like I was in a selfish microcosm.
Two things happened that week. One, I went out to a party where the people who met me could not believe that I, a fun and animated person, could be a scientist. I realized there is a huge divide between what people perceive happens in the sciences and what actually happens. A lot of cool people are doing really interesting stuff in their labs. The other was I met the UCLA nanoscientist Jim Gimzewski, who introduced me to Victoria Vesna, a multimedia artist who directs the UCLA Art|Sci Center.
Our conversations led to collaborations on art exhibitions founded in scientific topics like Hox genes and olfactory umwelts. Through art, I hope we are breaking the accessibility barrier to science. In the small Art|Sci community, I've talked to researchers who have contemplated working as artists but realized it's more amenable to make a living working as scientists. And a lot of artists I've met have thought about going into the sciences at one point. There seems to be a penchant for both inside a lot of us.
I wondered how to balance being a scientist while whetting my creativity within Art|Science and have deferred to Professor Gimzewski's advice that it's tough, but you just need to keep creating and something will come out of it. Some researchers do laugh at you, but more and more young scientists are excited about collaborating with artists.
I think the culture is emerging to where it's OK to talk about it.
For the last three years I've been at Columbia University, creating hybrid neural-electronic devices, biosensors, and biobatteries. Last fall I applied for the position at the University of Puget Sound. When I went there for interviews, I didn't have to hide anything. Every single faculty member I met made a point of asking me, "So tell me about your art work. How can I be involved?" It's a place where the liberal arts and sciences truly seem to be together.
The neuroscience program at Puget Sound developed a few years ago, when some faculty from biology, occupational therapy, and psychology came together and volunteered to develop some courses in neuroscience. What they created has blossomed, and they wanted a more dedicated position to take it further.
I've really missed the classroom while working in big research institutions, and have had to teach on the side, both at UCLA and the New School for Design. I was excited to see the inquiry-based learning at Puget Sound, and the curiosity and enthusiasm of the students.
Apart from the core neuroscience curricula, I also hope to develop interdisciplinary classes in art and science after my appointment begins, in January. The professorship has some money for a small research facility. In October I'll start setting up my research lab to examine neuroendocrine systems in zebra fish.
I've had these disparate but interesting things I've done, all of which I am passionate about, and this is the first time I can use all the things I do in one job.
June 18, 2012
'Swamy' Brings Congenial Leadership Style to UMass at Amherst
Kumble R. Subbaswamy likes to quote Thomas Jefferson: "Let us in education dream of an aristocracy of achievement arising out of a democracy of opportunity."
Mr. Subbaswamy used the quote in his address to the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in March, during his visit as one of four finalists to be chancellor.
He got the nod, and is set to take office on July 1.
It is clear during an interview that his enthusiasm for Jefferson's remark was not just candidate shtick. "That's really what public education is about," he says of Jefferson's dream of broad access. "And public universities are one of the greatest assets of this country."
Mr. Subbaswamy, who is 61, will arrive on the campus to "a lot of good will," says Max Page, a professor of architecture and history at Amherst who leads Phenom, a group that lobbies for public higher education in the state. "He was the far-and-wide consensus choice among all the campus groups."
Mr. Subbaswamy will be Amherst's fourth chancellor in 11 years, and the successor to Robert C. Holub, who leaves after four years amid some bad blood over his leadership style. "There is such a desire now to have someone who lasts," says Mr. Page. "His sense of humor and his manner will be valuable."
Ralph W. Whitehead, a professor of journalism who sat on a faculty committee that met the four finalists, agrees. An hourlong interview of Mr. Subbaswamy became "a free sample of his leadership style," he says. "Even though he was a job applicant, he didn't pander. He was very straightforward but also willing to listen to views other than his own."
Mr. Subbaswamy told the panel, with infectious enthusiasm, that he planned to improve enrollment access and cost containment, increase faculty hiring and the number of doctorates awarded, and better collaborate with the other four institutions of the Massachusetts system—pretty much everything on a campus leader's agenda, and all of it straightaway. He has excelled before, in such areas as fund raising and retention, and says: "At UMass, I'll have a great foundation to build on because those are all elements in which there's been demonstrable commitment and progress over the last four or five years."
In lobbying state political leaders for more support, Mr. Subbaswamy will be helped by his personable nature—"Please, call me Swamy," he tells people—but also by a growing sense that the state, like so many others, must find a more sustainable model of higher-education financing. "What is being called the new normal requires new approaches, entrepreneurship, an international outlook," he says. "I certainly believe in those and have a great deal of experience in bringing about progress through collaboration."
He has the strong support of the system's new president, Robert L. Caret, a chemist, who has praised Mr. Subbaswamy for his experience, vision, intellect, and drive.
Mr. Subbaswamy's experience includes three- to six-year stints as dean of arts and sciences at the University of Miami and at Indiana University at Bloomington, and, most recently, as provost of the University of Kentucky. He was raised in and around Bangalore, India, and came to the United States in 1971 for his doctoral studies in physics at Bloomington.
Among challenges he will face at Amherst is the institution's continuing bid to be invited to join the prestigious, 61-member Association of American Universities. He says that "to the extent it is a club," with its own complex deliberations and agendas, all an aspiring institution can do is ensure that "our quality screams at them and says, We're of the same quality—if not even better—than some of the members."
He says speaking frankly like that is the basis of his approach to campus diplomacy: "I find that in the beginning it causes a bit of shock, but in the end, once people see that I speak my mind and there is no hidden agenda, that works quite well."
During his candidate's speech on the campus, in response to a question about perceptions that the administration was too large and costly, he said he would remedy that by appointing an assistant chancellor to streamline it. The audience responded with laughter and applause.
May 20, 2012
Virginia Tech's Next Leader of Student Affairs Finds It a Small Campus at Heart
Since Virginia Tech chose Patricia A. Perillo
as its next vice president of student affairs, students and employees
of the Blacksburg institution have inundated her with welcoming cards
and e-mails.
From Davidson College, with its 1,850 students in a bucolic North Carolina setting, she will move in August to Virginia Tech, a campus with more than 30,000 full-time undergraduate and graduate students, a reputation for innovation in student and academic affairs, and a history of extraordinary distress that is visible in the stone memorial to the 32 students and faculty members who were killed by a student gunman there five years ago.
"Every university has defining moments, but those don't make the place," Ms. Perillo says. "There is so much more to the institution." She says she has never seen a campus with greater school spirit, judged by everything from general friendliness to the huge number of students and staff members sporting Virginia Tech apparel. "Love for the place reveals itself in so many ways there," she says.
In her 25 years of working in student affairs, Ms. Perillo, 49, has held posts in student affairs at institutions of the state systems of Maryland, Delaware, and New York. In the 2008-9 academic year, she was president of the American College Personnel Association.
She is a graduate of the University of Delaware who obtained her doctorate in community and public health from the University of Maryland at College Park, with a dissertation on "substance free" student housing.
She has been at Davidson since 2007, overseeing resident and Greek life and multicultural affairs—matters she has written about widely in professional journals. At the North Carolina campus, she has headed reforms on multicultural diversity and responsible drinking, and has also emphasized the role of residence halls and fraternities and sororities in boosting personal, social, and academic development.
Ms. Perillo supervised eight full-time staff members in a division with 76 other staff members and 200 student employees, a far cry from her work force at Virginia Tech, which will number 2,000. She will direct personal and career counseling, student conduct, alcohol-abuse prevention, recreational sports, Greek life, and many related areas.
"It's an enviable job she will walk into" because student affairs is "in very good shape," thanks to the foundation laid by her predecessors, says Mark G. McNamee, Virginia Tech's provost and senior vice president, to whom Ms. Perillo will report.
In recent years, new residence halls have been built, and older ones renovated or replaced. Like Davidson, but on a far larger scale, Virginia Tech has been working to link academic and student affairs. Those connections have included placing faculty members in residence halls and starting "living and learning" programs. Says Mr. McNamee: "We think that's the future of the residence-hall experience. We want to create programs where the line between academic and student life is blurred."
Ms. Perillo's predecessor, Edward F.D. Spencer, worked at the campus for 30 years, since late 2008 in the position she will now fill. His longevity there in student affairs was one factor that attracted her to the job after Virginia Tech administrators asked her to apply, Ms. Perillo says. That, and Virginia Tech's commitment to student life. "I knew that I do have extraordinary leadership capacities, and I am a strong, solid manager. So I needed some new and different challenges," she says.
She has been developing her skills since she became the first person in her large family to go to college. She says she has always valued that privilege. "My goal, always, is to help students to have the transformative opportunity I had," she says.
She took her current job, at Davidson, in 2007, with the thought that it would help her to be a better president of the American College Personnel Association. "I knew part of my constituency would be private institutions. I also wanted to understand what the learning environment was like at a place like Davidson."
Why, then, take a position at a huge campus like Virginia Tech's? "It's a big university, but it acts small," she says. "I never imagined I'd have the opportunity to be at a public university that had the sense of community, the heart, of a small liberal-arts college." On visits to the Blacksburg campus, she found "a sense of community that was palpable. I'm not sure I can even put words to it."
Those hundreds of cards and e-mails said some of what she cannot, she says. "I've never had that experience, anywhere."
By Peter Monaghan
From Davidson College, with its 1,850 students in a bucolic North Carolina setting, she will move in August to Virginia Tech, a campus with more than 30,000 full-time undergraduate and graduate students, a reputation for innovation in student and academic affairs, and a history of extraordinary distress that is visible in the stone memorial to the 32 students and faculty members who were killed by a student gunman there five years ago.
"Every university has defining moments, but those don't make the place," Ms. Perillo says. "There is so much more to the institution." She says she has never seen a campus with greater school spirit, judged by everything from general friendliness to the huge number of students and staff members sporting Virginia Tech apparel. "Love for the place reveals itself in so many ways there," she says.
In her 25 years of working in student affairs, Ms. Perillo, 49, has held posts in student affairs at institutions of the state systems of Maryland, Delaware, and New York. In the 2008-9 academic year, she was president of the American College Personnel Association.
She is a graduate of the University of Delaware who obtained her doctorate in community and public health from the University of Maryland at College Park, with a dissertation on "substance free" student housing.
She has been at Davidson since 2007, overseeing resident and Greek life and multicultural affairs—matters she has written about widely in professional journals. At the North Carolina campus, she has headed reforms on multicultural diversity and responsible drinking, and has also emphasized the role of residence halls and fraternities and sororities in boosting personal, social, and academic development.
Ms. Perillo supervised eight full-time staff members in a division with 76 other staff members and 200 student employees, a far cry from her work force at Virginia Tech, which will number 2,000. She will direct personal and career counseling, student conduct, alcohol-abuse prevention, recreational sports, Greek life, and many related areas.
"It's an enviable job she will walk into" because student affairs is "in very good shape," thanks to the foundation laid by her predecessors, says Mark G. McNamee, Virginia Tech's provost and senior vice president, to whom Ms. Perillo will report.
In recent years, new residence halls have been built, and older ones renovated or replaced. Like Davidson, but on a far larger scale, Virginia Tech has been working to link academic and student affairs. Those connections have included placing faculty members in residence halls and starting "living and learning" programs. Says Mr. McNamee: "We think that's the future of the residence-hall experience. We want to create programs where the line between academic and student life is blurred."
Ms. Perillo's predecessor, Edward F.D. Spencer, worked at the campus for 30 years, since late 2008 in the position she will now fill. His longevity there in student affairs was one factor that attracted her to the job after Virginia Tech administrators asked her to apply, Ms. Perillo says. That, and Virginia Tech's commitment to student life. "I knew that I do have extraordinary leadership capacities, and I am a strong, solid manager. So I needed some new and different challenges," she says.
She has been developing her skills since she became the first person in her large family to go to college. She says she has always valued that privilege. "My goal, always, is to help students to have the transformative opportunity I had," she says.
She took her current job, at Davidson, in 2007, with the thought that it would help her to be a better president of the American College Personnel Association. "I knew part of my constituency would be private institutions. I also wanted to understand what the learning environment was like at a place like Davidson."
Why, then, take a position at a huge campus like Virginia Tech's? "It's a big university, but it acts small," she says. "I never imagined I'd have the opportunity to be at a public university that had the sense of community, the heart, of a small liberal-arts college." On visits to the Blacksburg campus, she found "a sense of community that was palpable. I'm not sure I can even put words to it."
Those hundreds of cards and e-mails said some of what she cannot, she says. "I've never had that experience, anywhere."
May 6, 2012
NYU Dean to Devote His Sabbatical to Expanding U. of the People
Lisa Ackerman
By Peter Monaghan
Dalton Conley's research on how social and economic
opportunities are distributed has prompted him to get involved in
bringing college-level teaching to students who need an education that
costs next to nothing.
"Spreading education to populations that currently don't have access to it might do some good in the world," he says.
That reasoning led Mr. Conley, a prominent sociologist, to accept the post of dean of arts and sciences at the online University of the People, which has access as its motivating rationale.
The international, tuition-free, nonprofit institution, founded in 2009, is a pioneering effort in e-learning and peer-to-peer learning. Using open-source technology and coursework provided gratis by well-regarded institutions, it offers two- and four-year degree programs in business administration and computer science. It has formed partnerships with Yale University, New York University, and Hewlett-Packard, and to date has enrolled 1,400 students from 130 countries.
"Higher education is our best cultural product, as far as I'm concerned," says Mr. Conley. "We also export our less-impressive cultural products, McDonald's and Hollywood and so forth, so I think it's a great idea to help folks who want to help themselves to increase their skill sets and help their own countries."
Like other administrators at University of the People, Mr. Conley will work pro bono. He says he can do that because he is about to end a term as NYU's dean for the social sciences, and now has a year's sabbatical.
But the 42-year-old scholar's plate will remain full. In addition to being a professor of sociology, medicine, and public policy, with the title of university professor, at NYU, he is studying for another doctorate, this one in biology, at NYU. He is also an adjunct professor of community medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In all those roles, he studies the factors that determine economic opportunity within and across generations—among siblings, for example—and how health, biology, class, and race relate to social position.
The titles of a few of his six books reflect his populist bent: Being Black, Living in the Red; The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances; and Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.
Mr. Conley throws further light on his belief in educational access in his 2000 memoir, Honky. As the child of bohemian artists and one of few white children in a housing project on Manhattan's Lower East Side, he wrote in that book, he learned much about privileges related to race and class.
Was he surprised that NYU would approve his taking on even more work than he is already responsible for, at University of the People? Mr. Conley says: "I asked the president of NYU about it, and he gave the thumbs up. So I assume they're happy about it." NYU's president, John Sexton, is one of five global university leaders to serve on a newly formed Presidents Council that will advise the free university. And NYU administrators already knew of Mr. Conley's interest in the online model. He had just acted as a go-between—a "midwife," he says—for an agreement in which NYU will each year take some transfer students from University of the People, particularly at NYU's small Abu Dhabi campus.
Working on that effort brought Mr. Conley into contact with Shai Reshef, the founder and president of the online university.
As University of the People's dean of arts and sciences, Mr. Conley will work to expand course offerings. "We need to focus on pragmatic degrees that are going to help individuals in their societies, in developing countries," he says. He hopes the next two majors will be in health, to train nurses and community-health workers, and education, to train teachers.
He says he and fellow administrators are not only waiting for accreditation, which they hope to gain soon, but are preparing the institution for what may follow. He says: "It could be that the floodgates open, and we have 100,000 students all of a sudden."
"Spreading education to populations that currently don't have access to it might do some good in the world," he says.
That reasoning led Mr. Conley, a prominent sociologist, to accept the post of dean of arts and sciences at the online University of the People, which has access as its motivating rationale.
The international, tuition-free, nonprofit institution, founded in 2009, is a pioneering effort in e-learning and peer-to-peer learning. Using open-source technology and coursework provided gratis by well-regarded institutions, it offers two- and four-year degree programs in business administration and computer science. It has formed partnerships with Yale University, New York University, and Hewlett-Packard, and to date has enrolled 1,400 students from 130 countries.
"Higher education is our best cultural product, as far as I'm concerned," says Mr. Conley. "We also export our less-impressive cultural products, McDonald's and Hollywood and so forth, so I think it's a great idea to help folks who want to help themselves to increase their skill sets and help their own countries."
Like other administrators at University of the People, Mr. Conley will work pro bono. He says he can do that because he is about to end a term as NYU's dean for the social sciences, and now has a year's sabbatical.
But the 42-year-old scholar's plate will remain full. In addition to being a professor of sociology, medicine, and public policy, with the title of university professor, at NYU, he is studying for another doctorate, this one in biology, at NYU. He is also an adjunct professor of community medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In all those roles, he studies the factors that determine economic opportunity within and across generations—among siblings, for example—and how health, biology, class, and race relate to social position.
The titles of a few of his six books reflect his populist bent: Being Black, Living in the Red; The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances; and Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.
Mr. Conley throws further light on his belief in educational access in his 2000 memoir, Honky. As the child of bohemian artists and one of few white children in a housing project on Manhattan's Lower East Side, he wrote in that book, he learned much about privileges related to race and class.
Was he surprised that NYU would approve his taking on even more work than he is already responsible for, at University of the People? Mr. Conley says: "I asked the president of NYU about it, and he gave the thumbs up. So I assume they're happy about it." NYU's president, John Sexton, is one of five global university leaders to serve on a newly formed Presidents Council that will advise the free university. And NYU administrators already knew of Mr. Conley's interest in the online model. He had just acted as a go-between—a "midwife," he says—for an agreement in which NYU will each year take some transfer students from University of the People, particularly at NYU's small Abu Dhabi campus.
Working on that effort brought Mr. Conley into contact with Shai Reshef, the founder and president of the online university.
As University of the People's dean of arts and sciences, Mr. Conley will work to expand course offerings. "We need to focus on pragmatic degrees that are going to help individuals in their societies, in developing countries," he says. He hopes the next two majors will be in health, to train nurses and community-health workers, and education, to train teachers.
He says he and fellow administrators are not only waiting for accreditation, which they hope to gain soon, but are preparing the institution for what may follow. He says: "It could be that the floodgates open, and we have 100,000 students all of a sudden."
April 8, 2012
Dale Corson, Who Led Cornell
Dale R. Corson, who managed Cornell University through
troubled years in the early 1970s, died March 31 at age 97 from
congestive heart failure in Ithaca, N.Y., where he lived with his wife
of 73 years, Nellie Corson.
As Cornell's president from 1969 to 1977, Mr. Corson, a physicist, won acclaim for his steadying response to anti-Vietnam war protests and calls for greater inclusion of women and minorities in campus life. His management of the university's budget during the recession of the 1970s was also highly praised.
Mr. Corson was "a giant" who "guided the university through one of its most difficult periods with extraordinary integrity, strength, wisdom and grace," Cornell's current president, David J. Skorton, said in a letter to Cornellians. "His love for this institution was exemplary, and I feel privileged to have had him as a mentor and friend."
Born in a small Kansas town in 1914, Mr. Corson studied at the College of Emporia before earning a master's degree from the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley. During his doctoral studies, he and colleagues discovered and characterized the radioactive element astatine. During World War II, while working for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory, he helped introduce the use of radar in military operations.
After joining Cornell's physics department in 1946, he helped design the university's synchrotron and was considered one of the leading American physicists.
After serving as Cornell's president, Mr. Corson became its chancellor until 1979, when the Board of Trustees elected him president emeritus. He spent 20 years chairing national study groups on such subjects as international scientific relations. He founded the National Academy of Sciences' Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable, and lectured often about the future of the research university.
As Cornell's president from 1969 to 1977, Mr. Corson, a physicist, won acclaim for his steadying response to anti-Vietnam war protests and calls for greater inclusion of women and minorities in campus life. His management of the university's budget during the recession of the 1970s was also highly praised.
Mr. Corson was "a giant" who "guided the university through one of its most difficult periods with extraordinary integrity, strength, wisdom and grace," Cornell's current president, David J. Skorton, said in a letter to Cornellians. "His love for this institution was exemplary, and I feel privileged to have had him as a mentor and friend."
Born in a small Kansas town in 1914, Mr. Corson studied at the College of Emporia before earning a master's degree from the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley. During his doctoral studies, he and colleagues discovered and characterized the radioactive element astatine. During World War II, while working for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory, he helped introduce the use of radar in military operations.
After joining Cornell's physics department in 1946, he helped design the university's synchrotron and was considered one of the leading American physicists.
After serving as Cornell's president, Mr. Corson became its chancellor until 1979, when the Board of Trustees elected him president emeritus. He spent 20 years chairing national study groups on such subjects as international scientific relations. He founded the National Academy of Sciences' Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable, and lectured often about the future of the research university.
April 8, 2012
Harry Crews, U. of Florida Writing Professor With Cult Status
Harry Crews, an acclaimed writer who taught from 1968 to 1997
at the University of Florida at Gainesville, died at his home in that
city on March 28, at age 76. The cause was neuropathy.
The author of more than 20 novels and memoirs, as well as numerous screenplays, short stories, and magazine articles, he wrote about outsiders leading baroquely hardscrabble lives like the one he suffered as a child and cultivated as an adult.
His cult status has been borne out by rhapsodic testimonials since his death, many from former students. Mr. Crews first came to the Gainesville campus in the 1950s for a bachelor's degree and then a master's in education. He attended on the GI Bill after three years in the Marine Corps. He had entered the military as his family's first high-school graduate, a considerable accomplishment given that he had grown up in dire poverty in rural and small-town Georgia.
While teaching in Gainesville, Mr. Crews sported a Mohawk hairstyle and loud tattoos as part of a character-actorlike bearing that even he said should have drawn bank guards' attention. Some faculty colleagues complained that he should not be allowed on campus for students "to watch self-destruct" with alcohol and other addictions.
Indeed, said Erik Bledsoe, an independent literary critic who has edited collections of interviews and essays about the writer, Mr. Crews was larger than life, often abrasive, and undeniably—and undenyingly—self-destructive or obsessive. "If it wasn't alcohol or drugs, it was writing, or jogging, or bodybuilding, or whatever it was he'd set his mind to, at that moment," said Mr. Bledsoe. "He didn't do anything half-assed."
That included teaching, said Mr. Bledsoe: "He absolutely loved students." Even when he came to class drunk, or late, "he would talk about students' stories in depth. He'd read them and paid attention to them. He took the role and process of being a writing mentor very, very seriously."
The author of more than 20 novels and memoirs, as well as numerous screenplays, short stories, and magazine articles, he wrote about outsiders leading baroquely hardscrabble lives like the one he suffered as a child and cultivated as an adult.
His cult status has been borne out by rhapsodic testimonials since his death, many from former students. Mr. Crews first came to the Gainesville campus in the 1950s for a bachelor's degree and then a master's in education. He attended on the GI Bill after three years in the Marine Corps. He had entered the military as his family's first high-school graduate, a considerable accomplishment given that he had grown up in dire poverty in rural and small-town Georgia.
While teaching in Gainesville, Mr. Crews sported a Mohawk hairstyle and loud tattoos as part of a character-actorlike bearing that even he said should have drawn bank guards' attention. Some faculty colleagues complained that he should not be allowed on campus for students "to watch self-destruct" with alcohol and other addictions.
Indeed, said Erik Bledsoe, an independent literary critic who has edited collections of interviews and essays about the writer, Mr. Crews was larger than life, often abrasive, and undeniably—and undenyingly—self-destructive or obsessive. "If it wasn't alcohol or drugs, it was writing, or jogging, or bodybuilding, or whatever it was he'd set his mind to, at that moment," said Mr. Bledsoe. "He didn't do anything half-assed."
That included teaching, said Mr. Bledsoe: "He absolutely loved students." Even when he came to class drunk, or late, "he would talk about students' stories in depth. He'd read them and paid attention to them. He took the role and process of being a writing mentor very, very seriously."
April 8, 2012
Foundation Representative to Lead a Hands-On College
All undergraduate students at Warren Wilson College work 15
hours a week for the liberal-arts institution. Their choices include the
dining halls, the library, the fire crew, and the college's farm and
forest. They also must perform 100 hours of similarly varied "service
learning" while earning their degrees.
That "triad" of classroom instruction, workplace experience, and community service is what made Steven L. Solnick enthusiastic about assuming the college's presidency, come July.
"Those emphases teach stewardship of an institution," he says by phone from New Delhi, where since 2008 he has directed the Ford Foundation's programs in South Asia. "Warren Wilson is not a college where students spend four years as guests, receiving services from a professional staff and then learning in class. They're learning in class, but they also have ownership of the college."
Before New Delhi, Mr. Solnick spent six years with the Ford Foundation in Moscow. In both Ford jobs, he worked with nonprofit organizations and other outreach groups whose staffs were social-justice-minded people just like the ones Warren Wilson College tries to turn out, he says.
Helped by an executive-search firm, the college found him in Delhi. Its search committee was picky because it wanted to preserve and build on the gains by the incumbent president, William Sanborn (Sandy) Pfeiffer, who is retiring after six years in the job. Mr. Pfeiffer has boosted enrollment over 1,000 for the first time and lifted the endowment from $34-million to $54-million despite the economic pinch.
Mr. Solnick, who is 51, says he is glad to be returning to the United States. Asheville, N.C., the nearest town to Warren Wilson, is far from Moscow or Delhi, but he expects few adjustment pains. Colleges that boast of such goals as "sustainability decision-making" may sometimes be accused of indulging in platitudes, but Warren Wilson seems to walk the walk, or, rather, dig the organic gardens and tend the surrounding forest.
The way Warren Wilson maintains paths into the world beyond reminds Mr. Solnick of the missions of the Ford Foundation offices he led. He managed Ford programs in coordination with nonprofit organizations, donors, government agencies, and many other groups in such areas as human rights, higher education, arts and culture, media, sustainable agriculture, and reproductive health.
Along with honed management skills, Mr. Solnick has academic chops. Raised in Jersey City, N.J., he studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and political science at the University of Oxford. He earned his doctorate in political science at Harvard University, then taught at Columbia University for nine years and coordinated Russian studies at its Harriman Institute. He wrote Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions, published by Harvard University Press in 1998.
"What's interesting and attractive about this opportunity to return to academe is to do it at a place with a very strong cultural consciousness and sense of being connected to the outside world," he says. "I see that as being very much in the DNA of the college."
He may teach a course at Warren Wilson because, he says, "I'd feel somewhat handicapped if I didn't have a hand in a classroom setting." And perhaps the college's farm, whose bounty goes directly to the food halls, will beckon, and he'll end up milking a cow some morning.
Correction (12:36 p.m., 4/11/2012): A few details were in error in the original version and have been corrected. Mr. Solnick is 51, not 50. He spent six years with the Ford Foundation in Moscow, not eight. A second reference to William Sanborn (Sandy) Pfeiffer should have been to Mr. Pfeiffer, not Mr. Sanborn.
That "triad" of classroom instruction, workplace experience, and community service is what made Steven L. Solnick enthusiastic about assuming the college's presidency, come July.
"Those emphases teach stewardship of an institution," he says by phone from New Delhi, where since 2008 he has directed the Ford Foundation's programs in South Asia. "Warren Wilson is not a college where students spend four years as guests, receiving services from a professional staff and then learning in class. They're learning in class, but they also have ownership of the college."
Before New Delhi, Mr. Solnick spent six years with the Ford Foundation in Moscow. In both Ford jobs, he worked with nonprofit organizations and other outreach groups whose staffs were social-justice-minded people just like the ones Warren Wilson College tries to turn out, he says.
Helped by an executive-search firm, the college found him in Delhi. Its search committee was picky because it wanted to preserve and build on the gains by the incumbent president, William Sanborn (Sandy) Pfeiffer, who is retiring after six years in the job. Mr. Pfeiffer has boosted enrollment over 1,000 for the first time and lifted the endowment from $34-million to $54-million despite the economic pinch.
Mr. Solnick, who is 51, says he is glad to be returning to the United States. Asheville, N.C., the nearest town to Warren Wilson, is far from Moscow or Delhi, but he expects few adjustment pains. Colleges that boast of such goals as "sustainability decision-making" may sometimes be accused of indulging in platitudes, but Warren Wilson seems to walk the walk, or, rather, dig the organic gardens and tend the surrounding forest.
The way Warren Wilson maintains paths into the world beyond reminds Mr. Solnick of the missions of the Ford Foundation offices he led. He managed Ford programs in coordination with nonprofit organizations, donors, government agencies, and many other groups in such areas as human rights, higher education, arts and culture, media, sustainable agriculture, and reproductive health.
Along with honed management skills, Mr. Solnick has academic chops. Raised in Jersey City, N.J., he studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and political science at the University of Oxford. He earned his doctorate in political science at Harvard University, then taught at Columbia University for nine years and coordinated Russian studies at its Harriman Institute. He wrote Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions, published by Harvard University Press in 1998.
"What's interesting and attractive about this opportunity to return to academe is to do it at a place with a very strong cultural consciousness and sense of being connected to the outside world," he says. "I see that as being very much in the DNA of the college."
He may teach a course at Warren Wilson because, he says, "I'd feel somewhat handicapped if I didn't have a hand in a classroom setting." And perhaps the college's farm, whose bounty goes directly to the food halls, will beckon, and he'll end up milking a cow some morning.
Correction (12:36 p.m., 4/11/2012): A few details were in error in the original version and have been corrected. Mr. Solnick is 51, not 50. He spent six years with the Ford Foundation in Moscow, not eight. A second reference to William Sanborn (Sandy) Pfeiffer should have been to Mr. Pfeiffer, not Mr. Sanborn.
April 1, 2012
NYU Invites a Prominent American Bioethicist to Consider Health Issues Around the World
Not all humanities scholars who take an interest in science
and medicine grasp the different intellectual worlds those fields
occupy.
You've got a problem, says Arthur L. Caplan, if doctors, nurses, and research scientists look at you over a lab bench or emergency-room trolley and their eyes ask, "Do you really know what's going on here?"
He has not blundered into that pitfall. One of the country's leading bioethicists, Mr. Caplan has over the past 18 years helped make the University of Pennsylvania a stronghold for untangling the ethical quandaries that have only increased as health technologies abounded.
Most recently, as a professor of bioethics and director of the Center for Bioethics at the university's Perelman School of Medicine, he has prominently informed public debate with his frequent news-media appearances, as well as with numerous books and some 550 papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Now, Mr. Caplan, who is 62, has announced that he will leave Philadelphia because new challenges beckon from New York University. On July 1, he will become director of a new division of medical ethics in the near-new department of population health at NYU's Langone Medical Center.
Mr. Caplan says he leaves Penn in good hands because in recent years the university has hired two prominent bioethicists, Jonathan D. Moreno and Ezekiel J. Emanuel. But Penn will miss him—when his departure went public, J. Larry Jameson, Penn's dean of medicine, called him "a legend."
Luring Mr. Caplan to NYU has been a project for some time of its dean of medicine, Robert I. Grossman. He has been leading NYU's global-health expansion, and, having once worked at Penn, he had seen Mr. Caplan interacting not just with doctors and nurses facing dilemmas and crises, and dealing not just with the news media, but also doing a lot of "curbside consultations" that came from colleagues, and from patients and their family members around the world as a result of his renown.
Mr. Caplan's ability to deal with the pressures from all sides is partly a function of longevity: "If you hang around for a long time, you get better," he says. Raised in Boston and educated at Brandeis University, he completed a doctorate in history and the philosophy of science at Columbia University in 1979. Thirty-three years later, he holds seven honorary degrees and is a fellow or board member of numerous professional, governmental, and international bodies.
Still, much of his work is at a bracingly human, everyday level. "Many of the things I get asked about are pretty sad," he says. "They're not abstract, theoretical dilemmas. They're 'How do I deal with my badly burned child?'" For those, "you do need to have some emotional ballast."
The abstract and the real world mingle in his extensive, masterly writing about such issues as whether it is always wise to eradicate diseases, or how best to obtain informed consent in developing nations. He says he is eager to put such knowledge to work in NYU's push in global health, which is taking place through several minicampuses in such locations as Abu Dhabi and Shanghai.
Among the things that appeal to him about NYU, he says, is its emphasis on population health, and its practice of intervening at the level of systems rather than individuals by performing, for example, biostatistical, epidemiological, and social analyses.
Add to that the complication of, say, discussing bioethics in the Islamic world, with its fundamentally different cultural dimensions. "American bioethics is very much focused on individualism, autonomy, personal liberty," he says. "But those aren't always the cultural values that dominate in other places."
You've got a problem, says Arthur L. Caplan, if doctors, nurses, and research scientists look at you over a lab bench or emergency-room trolley and their eyes ask, "Do you really know what's going on here?"
He has not blundered into that pitfall. One of the country's leading bioethicists, Mr. Caplan has over the past 18 years helped make the University of Pennsylvania a stronghold for untangling the ethical quandaries that have only increased as health technologies abounded.
Most recently, as a professor of bioethics and director of the Center for Bioethics at the university's Perelman School of Medicine, he has prominently informed public debate with his frequent news-media appearances, as well as with numerous books and some 550 papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Now, Mr. Caplan, who is 62, has announced that he will leave Philadelphia because new challenges beckon from New York University. On July 1, he will become director of a new division of medical ethics in the near-new department of population health at NYU's Langone Medical Center.
Mr. Caplan says he leaves Penn in good hands because in recent years the university has hired two prominent bioethicists, Jonathan D. Moreno and Ezekiel J. Emanuel. But Penn will miss him—when his departure went public, J. Larry Jameson, Penn's dean of medicine, called him "a legend."
Luring Mr. Caplan to NYU has been a project for some time of its dean of medicine, Robert I. Grossman. He has been leading NYU's global-health expansion, and, having once worked at Penn, he had seen Mr. Caplan interacting not just with doctors and nurses facing dilemmas and crises, and dealing not just with the news media, but also doing a lot of "curbside consultations" that came from colleagues, and from patients and their family members around the world as a result of his renown.
Mr. Caplan's ability to deal with the pressures from all sides is partly a function of longevity: "If you hang around for a long time, you get better," he says. Raised in Boston and educated at Brandeis University, he completed a doctorate in history and the philosophy of science at Columbia University in 1979. Thirty-three years later, he holds seven honorary degrees and is a fellow or board member of numerous professional, governmental, and international bodies.
Still, much of his work is at a bracingly human, everyday level. "Many of the things I get asked about are pretty sad," he says. "They're not abstract, theoretical dilemmas. They're 'How do I deal with my badly burned child?'" For those, "you do need to have some emotional ballast."
The abstract and the real world mingle in his extensive, masterly writing about such issues as whether it is always wise to eradicate diseases, or how best to obtain informed consent in developing nations. He says he is eager to put such knowledge to work in NYU's push in global health, which is taking place through several minicampuses in such locations as Abu Dhabi and Shanghai.
Among the things that appeal to him about NYU, he says, is its emphasis on population health, and its practice of intervening at the level of systems rather than individuals by performing, for example, biostatistical, epidemiological, and social analyses.
Add to that the complication of, say, discussing bioethics in the Islamic world, with its fundamentally different cultural dimensions. "American bioethics is very much focused on individualism, autonomy, personal liberty," he says. "But those aren't always the cultural values that dominate in other places."
April 1, 2012
Microsoft Co-Founder's Brain Institute Attracts Top Academic Researchers
Five hundred million dollars can buy a lot of basic scientific research.
Last month, Paul G. Allen, who founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, announced that he would give the Allen Institute for Brain Science, in Seattle, an additional $300-million, on top of $200-million he had already donated since 2003 to establish and run the facility.
With that infusion, the institute is luring some of the country's leading neuroscientists. The newest are Ricardo Dolmetsch, an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, and R. Clay Reid, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. Both will start officially at the Allen Institute this summer, but already are active there alongside another recent hire, the California Institute of Technology's Christof Koch, the institute's new chief scientific officer.
Mr. Allen's donations will be used to double the institute's size over the next four years, from its current staff of 180 scientists, researchers, and other staff members, and to move into large new quarters.
The institute's aims are to understand how the brain works, what goes wrong in brain-related diseases and disorders, and how to treat them. Among key questions: How does the brain process information; what cellular structures underlie brain function; and how do brain cells create the circuits that drive behavior, thought, and dysfunction?
The institute has focused on creating atlases of the brain of the mouse—a far simpler model than the human brain—and the brain's handing of optical stimuli, as a steppingstone to other, even more complex brain functions. Among the achievements at the Seattle center has been the development of methods for using laser pulses to stimulate particular neural circuits in mouse brains. That allows researchers to zero in on what happens in particular, tagged brain cells.
Officials say they believe the institute's approaches will revolutionize understanding of the mammalian brain. Researchers, both at the institute and at thousands of other labs around the world, admit that the brain jealously guards most of its mysteries, but the Allen Institute's new hires are optimistic that the Seattle institution's approaches will rapidly unravel them.
Mr. Dolmetsch said university- and government-financed labs cannot afford the personnel and equipment to perform the multidisciplinary work that Mr. Allen wishes to encourage. Institute scientists expect to make their findings available to researchers around the world via freely accessible online databases.
Mr. Dolmetsch, whose specializations include such neurodevelopmental disorders as autism, said the approach is a brain-science equivalent of such developments as DNA sequencing in genomics as a way to provide powerful tools for researchers worldwide.
He said: "We hope to be able to recruit a lot of people. The project is going to be a large and really attractive one, especially now that other funding is difficult to get."
Last month, Paul G. Allen, who founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, announced that he would give the Allen Institute for Brain Science, in Seattle, an additional $300-million, on top of $200-million he had already donated since 2003 to establish and run the facility.
With that infusion, the institute is luring some of the country's leading neuroscientists. The newest are Ricardo Dolmetsch, an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, and R. Clay Reid, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. Both will start officially at the Allen Institute this summer, but already are active there alongside another recent hire, the California Institute of Technology's Christof Koch, the institute's new chief scientific officer.
Mr. Allen's donations will be used to double the institute's size over the next four years, from its current staff of 180 scientists, researchers, and other staff members, and to move into large new quarters.
The institute's aims are to understand how the brain works, what goes wrong in brain-related diseases and disorders, and how to treat them. Among key questions: How does the brain process information; what cellular structures underlie brain function; and how do brain cells create the circuits that drive behavior, thought, and dysfunction?
The institute has focused on creating atlases of the brain of the mouse—a far simpler model than the human brain—and the brain's handing of optical stimuli, as a steppingstone to other, even more complex brain functions. Among the achievements at the Seattle center has been the development of methods for using laser pulses to stimulate particular neural circuits in mouse brains. That allows researchers to zero in on what happens in particular, tagged brain cells.
Officials say they believe the institute's approaches will revolutionize understanding of the mammalian brain. Researchers, both at the institute and at thousands of other labs around the world, admit that the brain jealously guards most of its mysteries, but the Allen Institute's new hires are optimistic that the Seattle institution's approaches will rapidly unravel them.
Mr. Dolmetsch said university- and government-financed labs cannot afford the personnel and equipment to perform the multidisciplinary work that Mr. Allen wishes to encourage. Institute scientists expect to make their findings available to researchers around the world via freely accessible online databases.
Mr. Dolmetsch, whose specializations include such neurodevelopmental disorders as autism, said the approach is a brain-science equivalent of such developments as DNA sequencing in genomics as a way to provide powerful tools for researchers worldwide.
He said: "We hope to be able to recruit a lot of people. The project is going to be a large and really attractive one, especially now that other funding is difficult to get."
March 25, 2012
Geometer Tries a New Angle: Leading a College
New College of Florida, a liberal-arts-and-sciences honors
college within the Florida state system, has selected a mathematician as
its next president.
Donal B. O'Shea, 59, has been the dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs at Mount Holyoke College since 1998. He has also enjoyed a reputation as one of the world's best-known geometers.
His arcane specialty, "singularities of high-dimensional manifolds," merges algebra, geometry, calculus, and topology. And—take his word for it—"they're fascinating." Among his field's joys is the famous puzzle he explained in his 2007 book, The Poincaré Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe, which was translated into 11 languages.
Joanne V. Creighton, a president emeritus of Mount Holyoke, wrote in a recommendation to New College's trustees that Mr. O'Shea had received "the most extraordinary accolades about his creative and energetic leadership." An able fund raiser, he has boosted science education at Mount Holyoke as well as the number of minority students and the representation of women on the faculty.
Born in Canada, Mr. O'Shea studied mathematics at Harvard University and at the graduate level at Queen's University, in Ontario. He took a job in 1980 at Mount Holyoke, the world's oldest women's college, to become less "nerdy," he recalls. As chairman of the math department and, from 1998, the dean of faculty, "I realized I had a passion for liberal-arts colleges and how effectively they educate students."
He takes office at the 850-student New College, in Sarasota, on July 1. Faculty members there seem "to realize that they, like all liberal-arts colleges, need to change a bit" in the way they prepare students for the rapidly transforming "world of work," he says.
But he calls New College, along with so many of the relatively few remaining colleges of its type, "on the side of the angels."
Donal B. O'Shea, 59, has been the dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs at Mount Holyoke College since 1998. He has also enjoyed a reputation as one of the world's best-known geometers.
His arcane specialty, "singularities of high-dimensional manifolds," merges algebra, geometry, calculus, and topology. And—take his word for it—"they're fascinating." Among his field's joys is the famous puzzle he explained in his 2007 book, The Poincaré Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe, which was translated into 11 languages.
Joanne V. Creighton, a president emeritus of Mount Holyoke, wrote in a recommendation to New College's trustees that Mr. O'Shea had received "the most extraordinary accolades about his creative and energetic leadership." An able fund raiser, he has boosted science education at Mount Holyoke as well as the number of minority students and the representation of women on the faculty.
Born in Canada, Mr. O'Shea studied mathematics at Harvard University and at the graduate level at Queen's University, in Ontario. He took a job in 1980 at Mount Holyoke, the world's oldest women's college, to become less "nerdy," he recalls. As chairman of the math department and, from 1998, the dean of faculty, "I realized I had a passion for liberal-arts colleges and how effectively they educate students."
He takes office at the 850-student New College, in Sarasota, on July 1. Faculty members there seem "to realize that they, like all liberal-arts colleges, need to change a bit" in the way they prepare students for the rapidly transforming "world of work," he says.
But he calls New College, along with so many of the relatively few remaining colleges of its type, "on the side of the angels."
March 25, 2012
Antioch U.'s New Chancellor Comes by Way of New York Times Company
Felice Nudelman, who will take over as Antioch University's
chancellor on July 1, says she sees "perfect alignment" between her new
role and the work she has been doing for the past 11 and a half years:
leading education-outreach programs at the New York Times Company. Both
jobs involve advancing students' readiness to take part in civil
society, she says.
Ms. Nudelman, a 1995 graduate of Harvard University's Management Development Program, also has a master of fine arts degree from Pratt Institute.
She started at the Times company in 2000 as its college-marketing manager and rose to become the company's executive director of education eight years later. The national and international efforts she oversaw included programs that used Times publications in classroom curricula at 1,600 colleges and universities.
In 2002, she helped develop a large civic-engagement effort, the American Democracy Project, with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
The Antioch system, with about 5,000 adult students on five campuses in four states, international programs, and an admired doctorate in "leadership and change," is faring far better than in recent years. But it no longer includes its original institution, Antioch College. In 2008, Ms. Nudelman's predecessor as chancellor, Tullisse Antoinette (Toni) Murdock, oversaw its closure because of financial failures.
Irate alumni objected and succeeded in reopening the college last year as a stand-alone entity.
In November, Ms. Murdock announced her previously anticipated retirement .
Ms. Nudelman, whom Ms. Murdock has enthusiastically endorsed as her replacement, says she sees all Antioch's earlier difficulties as "absolutely" repairable. She says: "People want to move forward. People want to innovate, and to draw on the strengths of a very strong brand."
She learned much about the importance of "branding" at the Times company, where she was able to gauge winning approaches "from a national perspective, and look across multiple institutions and multiple leadership styles."
With its emphasis on social-justice issues, Antioch is geared to confront new realities in the working worlds of nonprofits and similar organizations, she believes: "This is a very exciting time in education. It's almost as if we're entering a renaissance period, and Antioch University has the ability to take a leadership role."
Fatma Imamoglu
Ms. Nudelman, a 1995 graduate of Harvard University's Management Development Program, also has a master of fine arts degree from Pratt Institute.
She started at the Times company in 2000 as its college-marketing manager and rose to become the company's executive director of education eight years later. The national and international efforts she oversaw included programs that used Times publications in classroom curricula at 1,600 colleges and universities.
In 2002, she helped develop a large civic-engagement effort, the American Democracy Project, with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
The Antioch system, with about 5,000 adult students on five campuses in four states, international programs, and an admired doctorate in "leadership and change," is faring far better than in recent years. But it no longer includes its original institution, Antioch College. In 2008, Ms. Nudelman's predecessor as chancellor, Tullisse Antoinette (Toni) Murdock, oversaw its closure because of financial failures.
Irate alumni objected and succeeded in reopening the college last year as a stand-alone entity.
In November, Ms. Murdock announced her previously anticipated retirement .
Ms. Nudelman, whom Ms. Murdock has enthusiastically endorsed as her replacement, says she sees all Antioch's earlier difficulties as "absolutely" repairable. She says: "People want to move forward. People want to innovate, and to draw on the strengths of a very strong brand."
She learned much about the importance of "branding" at the Times company, where she was able to gauge winning approaches "from a national perspective, and look across multiple institutions and multiple leadership styles."
With its emphasis on social-justice issues, Antioch is geared to confront new realities in the working worlds of nonprofits and similar organizations, she believes: "This is a very exciting time in education. It's almost as if we're entering a renaissance period, and Antioch University has the ability to take a leadership role."
March 18, 2012
Gray Matter's Gray Areas
Fatma Imamoglu
By his own account, Christof Koch's mind was taking odd turns long before it veered to the gnarly issue of consciousness.
Born in 1956 to a German diplomat and a doctor, he grew up in Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and Morocco. His parents sent him for schooling to Jesuits who, like them, were liberal Catholics who could take natural selection for granted, yet also profess a doctrinal account of heaven-directed life.
Koch's personality would indispose him to that mixing of provocative science and settled theology. At first, however, he was just a "nerd." Or so he says in his new book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press). At a time when PC's were only geeks' fantasies, he built his own Boolean-logic computer. He daydreamed elaborate tunnel-boring machines. He obsessed over electronics, astronomy, cosmology, space travel, and quantum mechanics. He revered the brilliant, absent-minded Professor Calculus of Tintin comic books, and figured out how to mix gunpowder for his bazooka.
Failing to burn down his family home, he went up to the University of Tübingen to study physics and philosophy. His gift for computer coding won him entry to the lab of Tomaso A. Poggio, the brilliant Italian theorist of information processing, at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. There, he wrote a program that modeled the three-dimensional trajectory of house flies. Poggio mentored his eclectic acolyte through a master's degree in physics and a doctorate in biophysics. Koch's dissertation computer-modeled how "excitatory and inhibitory synapses placed on a single nerve cell interact with each other."
The thesis was novel in its physics-heavy approach to brain functioning. Koch did not doubt the method, but scientific inquiry did make him increasingly question his childhood juggling of God and modern science. The latter largely won out, but with a compromise: He would embrace science's "single reality out there" while also contemplating its metaphysical implications. He believed, he writes, that "humanity is not condemned to wander forever in an epistemological fog."
As Koch grappled with the ways that brains do and do not resemble computers, Poggio was an ideal mentor. Koch followed him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and four years later, in 1986, took a position at the California Institute of Technology. He now holds an endowed chair in cognitive and behavioral biology there, and leads a lab of 25 postdocs and grad students. They explore what the neuronal bases of visual perception suggest about the nature of consciousness.
Pioneering consciousness studies requires a nimbly multiprocessing mind. That Koch possesses one is apparent over lunch in Seattle, where, since last year, he has also been the chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. With scores of colleagues, he is engaged in a huge, 10-year project to untangle the cerebral-cortex circuitry that underpins brain functions, with particular attention to the visual system of the mouse.
The diminutive rodent offers scientists peepholes into consciousness. To mark his gratitude, Koch last year had his upper left arm tattooed with a large representation of rodent cortical microcircuitry. It uses a drawing by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, who died in 1934.
Much about Koch is striking. For a science book, his is unusually forthcoming in relating his research to personal events—a crisis of faith; divorce; the death of a daughter. He's a fanatical mountain climber and long-distance trail runner. Those last, in particular, prompted me to spend some time gauging whether Koch is altogether sane.
Eminently so, it emerges, as the scientist courses through his brief, diverting account of his life and work while tackling onion soup. He appears at once diffident and not falsely modest. Eager to sound out his ideas. When stray subjects arise, he lurches at them. He says in his book that studying brain science is his compromise between being interested in everything and needing to focus on something.
Koch began to do that when, at Caltech, he befriended Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA. Despite colleagues' skepticism, Crick had come to devote his energies to the connections among anatomy, physiology, and consciousness. Crick and Koch would publish some two dozen journal articles on consciousness in the 20 years before Crick's death, in 2004.
As subjects of scientific inquiry go, consciousness ranks as among the most perplexing—philosophers call it the "Hard Problem" of whether or not the mind is just neurons being electromechanical things. Answering that, assert many philosophers and neuroscientists, will require knowledge perhaps centuries in the future, if even then. Koch writes: "I do not share this defeatist attitude."
He does not, of course, deny that the challenge is steep. It entails untold aspects of biochemistry, molecular biology, cognitive science, neuroscience, physics, evolutionary theory, and many other fields capped with their own clouds of unknowing.
Koch and colleagues currently narrow the problem by concentrating their experiments on just one aspect of consciousness, the possible role in it of neural activity related to faculties of seeing, attention, noticing, and dreaming. But the goal, says Koch, is to find "the specific synapses, neurons, and circuits that generate, that cause, consciousness," or at least are implicated in it—are "correlates" of it.
Finding chinks in the veil of consciousness is the common undertaking of consciousness researchers. Beyond may lie simple, elegant, incisive, versatile theories, or at least frameworks. But they are so far off, potentially, that many scientists assign the issue to theologians who may only pray they are not just as baffled.
Koch remains hopeful; he cites such advances as those of Seattle colleagues who can now manipulate and monitor individual mouse brain cells. Still, he allows, the brain remains "the most complex object in the known universe."
Significantly, he infers that "conscious, phenomenal experience is distinct from its underlying physical carrier." He is not alone in having to settle, for now, for that vague explanation. He says that it amounts to a "version of the soul"—a 21st-century version because "hélas, it is not immortal."
Why go down that rabbit hole, in whose recesses it may prove impossible to bridge "the seemingly unbridgeable gap" between the nervous system and its view of itself? Simple, says Koch: How else to cater to his "compelling and entirely subterranean desire to justify my instinctual belief that life is meaningful"?
Go ahead, call him a romantic. A reductionist one who seeks, as he writes, "quantitative explanations for consciousness in the ceaseless and ever-varied activity of billions of tiny nerve cells, each with their tens of thousands of synapses."
Born in 1956 to a German diplomat and a doctor, he grew up in Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and Morocco. His parents sent him for schooling to Jesuits who, like them, were liberal Catholics who could take natural selection for granted, yet also profess a doctrinal account of heaven-directed life.
Koch's personality would indispose him to that mixing of provocative science and settled theology. At first, however, he was just a "nerd." Or so he says in his new book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press). At a time when PC's were only geeks' fantasies, he built his own Boolean-logic computer. He daydreamed elaborate tunnel-boring machines. He obsessed over electronics, astronomy, cosmology, space travel, and quantum mechanics. He revered the brilliant, absent-minded Professor Calculus of Tintin comic books, and figured out how to mix gunpowder for his bazooka.
Failing to burn down his family home, he went up to the University of Tübingen to study physics and philosophy. His gift for computer coding won him entry to the lab of Tomaso A. Poggio, the brilliant Italian theorist of information processing, at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. There, he wrote a program that modeled the three-dimensional trajectory of house flies. Poggio mentored his eclectic acolyte through a master's degree in physics and a doctorate in biophysics. Koch's dissertation computer-modeled how "excitatory and inhibitory synapses placed on a single nerve cell interact with each other."
The thesis was novel in its physics-heavy approach to brain functioning. Koch did not doubt the method, but scientific inquiry did make him increasingly question his childhood juggling of God and modern science. The latter largely won out, but with a compromise: He would embrace science's "single reality out there" while also contemplating its metaphysical implications. He believed, he writes, that "humanity is not condemned to wander forever in an epistemological fog."
As Koch grappled with the ways that brains do and do not resemble computers, Poggio was an ideal mentor. Koch followed him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and four years later, in 1986, took a position at the California Institute of Technology. He now holds an endowed chair in cognitive and behavioral biology there, and leads a lab of 25 postdocs and grad students. They explore what the neuronal bases of visual perception suggest about the nature of consciousness.
Pioneering consciousness studies requires a nimbly multiprocessing mind. That Koch possesses one is apparent over lunch in Seattle, where, since last year, he has also been the chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. With scores of colleagues, he is engaged in a huge, 10-year project to untangle the cerebral-cortex circuitry that underpins brain functions, with particular attention to the visual system of the mouse.
The diminutive rodent offers scientists peepholes into consciousness. To mark his gratitude, Koch last year had his upper left arm tattooed with a large representation of rodent cortical microcircuitry. It uses a drawing by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, who died in 1934.
Much about Koch is striking. For a science book, his is unusually forthcoming in relating his research to personal events—a crisis of faith; divorce; the death of a daughter. He's a fanatical mountain climber and long-distance trail runner. Those last, in particular, prompted me to spend some time gauging whether Koch is altogether sane.
Eminently so, it emerges, as the scientist courses through his brief, diverting account of his life and work while tackling onion soup. He appears at once diffident and not falsely modest. Eager to sound out his ideas. When stray subjects arise, he lurches at them. He says in his book that studying brain science is his compromise between being interested in everything and needing to focus on something.
Koch began to do that when, at Caltech, he befriended Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA. Despite colleagues' skepticism, Crick had come to devote his energies to the connections among anatomy, physiology, and consciousness. Crick and Koch would publish some two dozen journal articles on consciousness in the 20 years before Crick's death, in 2004.
As subjects of scientific inquiry go, consciousness ranks as among the most perplexing—philosophers call it the "Hard Problem" of whether or not the mind is just neurons being electromechanical things. Answering that, assert many philosophers and neuroscientists, will require knowledge perhaps centuries in the future, if even then. Koch writes: "I do not share this defeatist attitude."
He does not, of course, deny that the challenge is steep. It entails untold aspects of biochemistry, molecular biology, cognitive science, neuroscience, physics, evolutionary theory, and many other fields capped with their own clouds of unknowing.
Koch and colleagues currently narrow the problem by concentrating their experiments on just one aspect of consciousness, the possible role in it of neural activity related to faculties of seeing, attention, noticing, and dreaming. But the goal, says Koch, is to find "the specific synapses, neurons, and circuits that generate, that cause, consciousness," or at least are implicated in it—are "correlates" of it.
Finding chinks in the veil of consciousness is the common undertaking of consciousness researchers. Beyond may lie simple, elegant, incisive, versatile theories, or at least frameworks. But they are so far off, potentially, that many scientists assign the issue to theologians who may only pray they are not just as baffled.
Koch remains hopeful; he cites such advances as those of Seattle colleagues who can now manipulate and monitor individual mouse brain cells. Still, he allows, the brain remains "the most complex object in the known universe."
Significantly, he infers that "conscious, phenomenal experience is distinct from its underlying physical carrier." He is not alone in having to settle, for now, for that vague explanation. He says that it amounts to a "version of the soul"—a 21st-century version because "hélas, it is not immortal."
Why go down that rabbit hole, in whose recesses it may prove impossible to bridge "the seemingly unbridgeable gap" between the nervous system and its view of itself? Simple, says Koch: How else to cater to his "compelling and entirely subterranean desire to justify my instinctual belief that life is meaningful"?
Go ahead, call him a romantic. A reductionist one who seeks, as he writes, "quantitative explanations for consciousness in the ceaseless and ever-varied activity of billions of tiny nerve cells, each with their tens of thousands of synapses."
March 18, 2012
In Memoriam: F. Sherwood Rowland, Ozone-Alert Chemist
F. Sherwood Rowland, a founding chemistry professor at the
University of California at Irvine who shaped conceptions of the
environment by warning about depletion of the ozone layer, died on March
10 from complications of Parkinson's disease. He was 84.
In 1974, Mr. Rowland and a postdoctoral assistant at Irvine, Mario J. Molina, wrote in Nature that chlorofluorocarbons, or CFC's, which were widely used in aerosol consumer products, were severely damaging the ozone layer in the stratosphere.
Mr. Rowland warned of grave danger to humans and many biological systems. The United States and a few other countries eventually heeded him and began banning the compound in the late 1970s. After British scientists documented severe ozone depletion over Antarctica in 1985, an almost worldwide ban on CFC's resulted.
In 1995, Mr. Rowland and Mr. Molina received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Their colleague Ralph J. Cicerone, who went on to become Irvine's chancellor and is now president of the National Academy of Sciences, last week echoed the praise from many of Mr. Rowland's colleagues over the years. "He was very principled, very honorable, and a very clear communicator" who revolutionized the study of atmospheric chemistry, Mr. Cicerone said.
At the Irvine campus, Mr. Rowland, who was known as Sherry, was a much-revered figure and a prominent one—he was a 6-feet-5-inch semi-pro baseball player as a young man. His lab partner of 38 years, Donald R. Blake, said, "Sherry was a wonderful colleague" with an extraordinary gift for insisting on scientific findings and withstanding opposition: "I never once saw him angry, never."
Irvine's chancellor, Michael V. Drake, said Mr. Rowland's contributions to the campus had been "instrumental in making us who we are."
"When he was asked what should be the profile of the director," Mr. Dijkgraaf says, "he said basically he should not interfere at all with what was going on."
But steering a straight course requires constant reinvention, "because society and the way science is funded change," says Mr. Dijkgraaf, who is 51.
The privately run institute, founded in 1930, boasts 27 Nobel laureates, 38 Fields medalists in mathematics, and many MacArthur fellows among its present or former members. Its 28 permanent faculty members profit from a teaching-free opportunity to pursue whatever studies they like in four schools: mathematics, natural science, historical studies, and social science. So, too, do about 190 visiting scholars, each of whom spends two or three years there. "I call the institute a transformational place: People go there in all freedom, but there's a lot of focus to really invest in their research," says Mr. Dijkgraaf.
As president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Distinguished University Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Amsterdam, he does not lack for qualifications to succeed the departing director, the British mathematical physicist Peter Goddard, who will return to a professorship at the institute.
Mr. Dijkgraaf won the NWO-Spinoza Prize, the Netherlands' highest scientific award, in 2003. He is also co-chair of the InterAcademy Council, the research council of the science academies of the world, which advises governments and international organizations on scientific, technological, and health issues.
Among the Princeton institute's directors has been one of the pivotal figures in physics, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
It's "a job you can't apply for," Mr. Dijkgraaf says. A search committee approached him in June. Vartan Gregorian, the committee's chair, who is president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, said in a written statement that Mr. Dijkgraaf emerged as the preferred candidate because of his "rigorous intellect, matchless talent as a scientist, thinker, and teacher, along with the depth and breadth of his experience as an institutional administrator."
Going to Princeton "feels like a very natural next step to take," Mr. Dijkgraaf says. He attributes his research success in part to spending some formative years there, both at Princeton University and at the institute, in the early 1990s. "It set the course of the rest of my career," he says. "I remember very well my first visit. I felt I was going to the next level."
He was thrown into collaboration with Edward Witten, a renowned theoretical physicist who still works at the institute and who has made key advances in string theory.
The institute has plenty of fellows who have changed the course of scientific and everyday life. But not all of them possess Mr. Dijkgraaf's ability to explain what he does—and his work is indeed arcane—in language that might captivate colleagues in any field. While a news release speaks of his finding "surprising and deep connections between matrix models, string theory, topological string theory, and supersymmetric quantum field theory," Mr. Dijkgraaf puts it this way: "My research crosses and connects the fields of physics and mathematics."
Physics, he says, has moved into "this bizarre world of quantum mechanics, of elementary particles which behave very differently than in our everyday intuition," and yet discoveries about not only particles but also black holes and an expanding universe "can be entirely cast in very natural mathematical formulas and symbols."
He adds: "The wonder is that mathematics that we developed almost at room temperature, just using objects in our immediate sphere, can be applied to the full universe or to the smallest constituents."
The ability to communicate scientific ideas has made Mr. Dijkgraaf a popular figure in the Netherlands. He has a column in a Dutch newspaper and appears on a popular television show to promote young colleagues and their scientific research.
He also started a Dutch-language Web site on physics for children, Proefjes.nl. "When I was a kid, whenever I read something or understood something, I really felt the urge to share that with others," he says. He even married a communicator, the novelist Pia de Jong.
Explaining science to anyone who is interested will be an emphasis of his leadership at the institute, Mr. Dijkgraaf says. "We are creative in the ways we approach research, continuously thinking of ways to collaborate and ways to experiment and communicate. I often approach outreach, connecting to the public at large, in the same way."
In 1974, Mr. Rowland and a postdoctoral assistant at Irvine, Mario J. Molina, wrote in Nature that chlorofluorocarbons, or CFC's, which were widely used in aerosol consumer products, were severely damaging the ozone layer in the stratosphere.
Mr. Rowland warned of grave danger to humans and many biological systems. The United States and a few other countries eventually heeded him and began banning the compound in the late 1970s. After British scientists documented severe ozone depletion over Antarctica in 1985, an almost worldwide ban on CFC's resulted.
In 1995, Mr. Rowland and Mr. Molina received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Their colleague Ralph J. Cicerone, who went on to become Irvine's chancellor and is now president of the National Academy of Sciences, last week echoed the praise from many of Mr. Rowland's colleagues over the years. "He was very principled, very honorable, and a very clear communicator" who revolutionized the study of atmospheric chemistry, Mr. Cicerone said.
At the Irvine campus, Mr. Rowland, who was known as Sherry, was a much-revered figure and a prominent one—he was a 6-feet-5-inch semi-pro baseball player as a young man. His lab partner of 38 years, Donald R. Blake, said, "Sherry was a wonderful colleague" with an extraordinary gift for insisting on scientific findings and withstanding opposition: "I never once saw him angry, never."
Irvine's chancellor, Michael V. Drake, said Mr. Rowland's contributions to the campus had been "instrumental in making us who we are."
March 4, 2012
At a Small Campus in California, a Top-Ranked Economist Predicts What's Next
With highly paid analysts and resources to burn, giant financial companies should be able to pinpoint economic trends.
But Sung Won Sohn does plenty well, all on his own. In this year's Wall Street Journal ranking of the country's top economic forecasters, Mr. Sohn, a professor of economics at California State University-Channel Islands, in Camarillo, ranked third, the only academic in the top 10. Other economists high on the list are from big-name establishments like Societe Generale, FedEx Corporation, and PNC Financial Services Group.
The newspaper asked economists in January 2011 to predict the year's fortunes for 10 key indicators. Mr. Sohn's third-place finish echoed earlier performances in the prestigious ranking: He came in fifth in 2010, and in 2006 led the whole pack. This year, among academic economists, the only others in the top 50 were Sean M. Snaith, University of Central Florida, 28th; Edward E. Learner and David Shulman, UCLA Anderson Forecast, 39th; and J. Dewey Daane, Vanderbilt University, 45th.
How does Mr. Sohn, working alone at a small campus, fare so well? Aside from working tirelessly—"You don't just get up in the morning and write down a bunch of numbers; you have to keep up with it, every single day, every minute," he says by phone—he has vast experience. He has served in senior economic-adviser positions at the White House, major banks, and large corporations. Among his many present positions, he is one of five commissioners who oversee operations of the Port of Los Angeles, the country's largest port.
He says he started his career with a global outlook, as a Korea-raised graduate of Harvard Business School and the University of Pittsburgh, and now works 30 years' worth of contacts around the world: "For example, if I want to know what's happening in Greece, or in Detroit, I can call right now on the phone and get the firsthand information, on the ground. That's important. A lot of times, most economists analyze government data, and by the time you get that, it's really old news."
Since 2008 he has been at CSU-Channel Islands, an institution of 4,200 students, attracted by a longstanding friendship with its president, Richard R. Rush, who has led the university since it opened a decade ago. Another attraction, Mr. Sohn says, was the opportunity to set up the Institute for Global Economic Research at the School of Business and Economics. So far that is really just him.
What are his best tips?
In the short term, the United States will be OK, because the subprime mortgage crisis has been "somewhat cleaned up," businesses have "tons of cash," and financial institutions are "pretty well capitalized."
In the medium term, certainly Europe will fare poorly ("it's in a pretty serious situation, with a lot of bad sovereign debt"), and before long, China will, too ("too dependent on exports," "too government-directed" and thus liable to misallocate resources, "that bubble is going to burst").
In the long term, the United States will be hurt by entanglements with struggling economies.
"You can't be too optimistic," he says. "There will be more volatility and more uncertainty and unknowns." And yet, "I still believe as an economist that private capitalism is the best way to go," he says.
And he is usually right.
But Sung Won Sohn does plenty well, all on his own. In this year's Wall Street Journal ranking of the country's top economic forecasters, Mr. Sohn, a professor of economics at California State University-Channel Islands, in Camarillo, ranked third, the only academic in the top 10. Other economists high on the list are from big-name establishments like Societe Generale, FedEx Corporation, and PNC Financial Services Group.
The newspaper asked economists in January 2011 to predict the year's fortunes for 10 key indicators. Mr. Sohn's third-place finish echoed earlier performances in the prestigious ranking: He came in fifth in 2010, and in 2006 led the whole pack. This year, among academic economists, the only others in the top 50 were Sean M. Snaith, University of Central Florida, 28th; Edward E. Learner and David Shulman, UCLA Anderson Forecast, 39th; and J. Dewey Daane, Vanderbilt University, 45th.
How does Mr. Sohn, working alone at a small campus, fare so well? Aside from working tirelessly—"You don't just get up in the morning and write down a bunch of numbers; you have to keep up with it, every single day, every minute," he says by phone—he has vast experience. He has served in senior economic-adviser positions at the White House, major banks, and large corporations. Among his many present positions, he is one of five commissioners who oversee operations of the Port of Los Angeles, the country's largest port.
He says he started his career with a global outlook, as a Korea-raised graduate of Harvard Business School and the University of Pittsburgh, and now works 30 years' worth of contacts around the world: "For example, if I want to know what's happening in Greece, or in Detroit, I can call right now on the phone and get the firsthand information, on the ground. That's important. A lot of times, most economists analyze government data, and by the time you get that, it's really old news."
Since 2008 he has been at CSU-Channel Islands, an institution of 4,200 students, attracted by a longstanding friendship with its president, Richard R. Rush, who has led the university since it opened a decade ago. Another attraction, Mr. Sohn says, was the opportunity to set up the Institute for Global Economic Research at the School of Business and Economics. So far that is really just him.
What are his best tips?
In the short term, the United States will be OK, because the subprime mortgage crisis has been "somewhat cleaned up," businesses have "tons of cash," and financial institutions are "pretty well capitalized."
In the medium term, certainly Europe will fare poorly ("it's in a pretty serious situation, with a lot of bad sovereign debt"), and before long, China will, too ("too dependent on exports," "too government-directed" and thus liable to misallocate resources, "that bubble is going to burst").
In the long term, the United States will be hurt by entanglements with struggling economies.
"You can't be too optimistic," he says. "There will be more volatility and more uncertainty and unknowns." And yet, "I still believe as an economist that private capitalism is the best way to go," he says.
And he is usually right.
February 26, 2012
Leader of American U. of Beirut Sells It to Scholars as Oasis of Liberal Arts
The inauguration of Peter F. Dorman as the 15th president of
American University of Beirut in 2009 was the first such ceremony the
campus dared to hold in a quarter of a century. Lebanon's civil war of
1975 to 1990 did not spare the institution the violence that ravaged the
whole country; in 1984, the university's then-president, Malcolm H.
Kerr, was shot to death.
Mr. Dorman's move to Beirut from the University of Chicago was in many senses a return to his roots. He had grown up there. His great-great-grandfather, Daniel Bliss, founded the university 146 years ago. Mr. Dorman's great-grandmother helped start the nursing service at the its hospital in 1905, and his grandfather became an obstetrician and the university's first dean of medicine.
"In so many ways, I feel I have come home," he says.
Mr. Dorman's tenure so far has been constructive, busy, and instructive, he says by telephone from his office. He is trying to extend the work of his predecessor John Waterbury, who spent 10 years rebuilding the campus's plant, resources, governance structure, and academic standards.
While very few international academics were at the university by the end of the civil war, they now represent one-quarter of the faculty. Students from outside Lebanon are enrolled in similar proportion. Most in both groups are from Lebanon's vast diaspora; many hold dual American and Lebanese citizenship.
Mr. Dorman and his colleagues attract those expatriates by pointing out the benefits of doing research on such topics as Islamic history, archaeology, even "consanguineous health," a study that is aided by local traditions of marriages of close relatives.
He has learned to pitch Beirut against the "continuing perception of political instability" there, the "bombed-out hulk of a city riven by armed gangs" that it remains in many Westerners' minds. "Beirut is now viewed as one of the safer paces in the Middle East," and the city is culturally, intellectually, and socially vibrant, and enjoys a high standard of living, he says.
The university's alumni assure Mr. Dorman that what the country needs is, in fact, AUB-style education.
The university, with 8,000 students, offers bachelor's degrees in agriculture and English literature, among other majors, and advanced degrees in fields like biology, engineering, and medicine. It began as Syrian Protestant College, whose founders championed an American liberal-arts philosophy, cast in 19th-century terms like "making men."
Mr. Dorman summarizes the current mission as "creating engaged and responsible citizens." Despotic Arab regimes, while often stable, "have not enabled individuals to take part in governance and to think about their larger civic responsibilities," he says. "So any institution in the Middle East that is based on the American liberal arts has an enormous opportunity."
Spending his childhood in Beirut with his parents, who were Presbyterian missionaries, planted the seed of Mr. Dorman's academic expertise, Egyptology, which he pursued as a student and later on the faculty at Chicago. He recalls visiting sites linked to ancient Middle Eastern history, in particular the Dog River, which he says encapsulates Lebanon's history: "It spills out of the mountains, right at a headland that sticks out into the Mediterranean, and it was the only passable point along the coast. There was a road that all conquering armies had to take to get north and south."
Still, he didn't contemplate moving back to Beirut until he spent a sabbatical there, his first visit to the city in 35 years. Being named the university's president soon afterward still surprises him. But the search committee persuaded him that it was the right move, he says, and Mr. Dorman agreed.
Mr. Dorman's move to Beirut from the University of Chicago was in many senses a return to his roots. He had grown up there. His great-great-grandfather, Daniel Bliss, founded the university 146 years ago. Mr. Dorman's great-grandmother helped start the nursing service at the its hospital in 1905, and his grandfather became an obstetrician and the university's first dean of medicine.
"In so many ways, I feel I have come home," he says.
Mr. Dorman's tenure so far has been constructive, busy, and instructive, he says by telephone from his office. He is trying to extend the work of his predecessor John Waterbury, who spent 10 years rebuilding the campus's plant, resources, governance structure, and academic standards.
While very few international academics were at the university by the end of the civil war, they now represent one-quarter of the faculty. Students from outside Lebanon are enrolled in similar proportion. Most in both groups are from Lebanon's vast diaspora; many hold dual American and Lebanese citizenship.
Mr. Dorman and his colleagues attract those expatriates by pointing out the benefits of doing research on such topics as Islamic history, archaeology, even "consanguineous health," a study that is aided by local traditions of marriages of close relatives.
He has learned to pitch Beirut against the "continuing perception of political instability" there, the "bombed-out hulk of a city riven by armed gangs" that it remains in many Westerners' minds. "Beirut is now viewed as one of the safer paces in the Middle East," and the city is culturally, intellectually, and socially vibrant, and enjoys a high standard of living, he says.
The university's alumni assure Mr. Dorman that what the country needs is, in fact, AUB-style education.
The university, with 8,000 students, offers bachelor's degrees in agriculture and English literature, among other majors, and advanced degrees in fields like biology, engineering, and medicine. It began as Syrian Protestant College, whose founders championed an American liberal-arts philosophy, cast in 19th-century terms like "making men."
Mr. Dorman summarizes the current mission as "creating engaged and responsible citizens." Despotic Arab regimes, while often stable, "have not enabled individuals to take part in governance and to think about their larger civic responsibilities," he says. "So any institution in the Middle East that is based on the American liberal arts has an enormous opportunity."
Spending his childhood in Beirut with his parents, who were Presbyterian missionaries, planted the seed of Mr. Dorman's academic expertise, Egyptology, which he pursued as a student and later on the faculty at Chicago. He recalls visiting sites linked to ancient Middle Eastern history, in particular the Dog River, which he says encapsulates Lebanon's history: "It spills out of the mountains, right at a headland that sticks out into the Mediterranean, and it was the only passable point along the coast. There was a road that all conquering armies had to take to get north and south."
Still, he didn't contemplate moving back to Beirut until he spent a sabbatical there, his first visit to the city in 35 years. Being named the university's president soon afterward still surprises him. But the search committee persuaded him that it was the right move, he says, and Mr. Dorman agreed.
February 19, 2012
'Our Storehouse of Knowledge About Social Movements ... Is Going to Be Left Bare'
Wendy Scarce: Rik Scarce
In 1993, Rik Scarce, while a doctoral student at Washington
State University, spent five months in jail on a federal
contempt-of-court charge rather than reveal details of his research
interviews with "earth liberation" activists. The judge in the case
released Mr. Scarce, now an associate professor of sociology at Skidmore
College, upon determining that no length of imprisonment would prise
information from him.
The Chronicle asked Mr. Scarce for his views of the controversy over a court order, stayed as of press time, that would require Boston College to release oral-history records relating to decades-old sectarian strife in Northern Ireland. Boston College did hand over some of the documents, which the Police Service of Northern Island had requested, in part to advance an investigation of a 1972 murder.
Last month a federal judge dismissed two researchers' legal challenge to any release, saying they lacked legal standing even though Boston College had required them to draw up confidentiality contracts with their informants. Here is an edited version of Mr. Scarce's comments on those events.
The Chronicle asked Mr. Scarce for his views of the controversy over a court order, stayed as of press time, that would require Boston College to release oral-history records relating to decades-old sectarian strife in Northern Ireland. Boston College did hand over some of the documents, which the Police Service of Northern Island had requested, in part to advance an investigation of a 1972 murder.
Last month a federal judge dismissed two researchers' legal challenge to any release, saying they lacked legal standing even though Boston College had required them to draw up confidentiality contracts with their informants. Here is an edited version of Mr. Scarce's comments on those events.
Q. What is the principled stance here?
A. The researchers' stance. You give your research
participants assurances of confidentiality, and you stand by those
statements. What you don't do is to do what Boston College appears to be
doing, which is to cave in, in an instant. The tragedy is, that is
exactly what many institutions do.
Q. Why don't institutions admit that they cannot guarantee confidentiality?
A. I think they are all about avoiding lawsuits
rather than protecting confidentiality, and unfortunately every now and
then naïve, or overconfident, or simply very bold researchers move on
with a research project, not understanding that the interests of their
research participants are not necessarily in line with those of their
institution.
Q. What's the harm there?
A. I'm profoundly concerned about what will happen
to the research enterprise—further work on the IRA., for instance. If
that research cannot take place, then our storehouse of knowledge about
social movements, and violent ones at that—the very ones we most want
to know about—is going to be left bare. Who will participate? That is
exactly the same issue I encountered: If I cooperated, who would ever
answer a journalist's questions or a researcher's questions about the
radical environmental movement? Without that kind of information, we are
all left in the dark.
Q. Who is that "we"?
A. Everyone from the citizen who is simply curious
or concerned, all the way to law enforcement and policy makers who may
want to shut down or eliminate a given social movement or a given form
of activism. Our research can inform all of these endeavors and as such
needs to be treated as the precious thing that it is rather than—as
happens every few years—turned into a tool for law enforcement.
Q. But in the office of a psychologist, for example, those confessions can be reportable.
A. I think that given the appropriate
circumstances—a known researcher-participant relationship with explicit
assurance of confidentiality—that, in light of the First Amendment,
separates the research and journalistic fact-finding endeavor from all
others.
Q. What happened to your research when you were imprisoned?
A. I changed my Ph.D. topic from my work on the radical environmental movement, which would have followed on from my book, Eco-Warriors, which I published immediately before I began my Ph.D. research, to the sociology of salmon biology.
Q. Because people in the radical environmental movement knew it was no longer safe to talk?
A. That point was exactly on my mind as I was
heading to jail. I wasn't interested in essentially dragging the FBI
around with me as I went around and tried to conduct my work.
November 27, 2011
Institute's New Director, a Mathematical Physicist, Wants to Explain Science
When the Dutch theoretical physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf takes over as director of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J., in July, he will follow the advice of one of its most noted faculty members, Albert Einstein.
"When he was asked what should be the profile of the director," Mr. Dijkgraaf says, "he said basically he should not interfere at all with what was going on."
But steering a straight course requires constant reinvention, "because society and the way science is funded change," says Mr. Dijkgraaf, who is 51.
The privately run institute, founded in 1930, boasts 27 Nobel laureates, 38 Fields medalists in mathematics, and many MacArthur fellows among its present or former members. Its 28 permanent faculty members profit from a teaching-free opportunity to pursue whatever studies they like in four schools: mathematics, natural science, historical studies, and social science. So, too, do about 190 visiting scholars, each of whom spends two or three years there. "I call the institute a transformational place: People go there in all freedom, but there's a lot of focus to really invest in their research," says Mr. Dijkgraaf.
As president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Distinguished University Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Amsterdam, he does not lack for qualifications to succeed the departing director, the British mathematical physicist Peter Goddard, who will return to a professorship at the institute.
Mr. Dijkgraaf won the NWO-Spinoza Prize, the Netherlands' highest scientific award, in 2003. He is also co-chair of the InterAcademy Council, the research council of the science academies of the world, which advises governments and international organizations on scientific, technological, and health issues.
Among the Princeton institute's directors has been one of the pivotal figures in physics, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
It's "a job you can't apply for," Mr. Dijkgraaf says. A search committee approached him in June. Vartan Gregorian, the committee's chair, who is president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, said in a written statement that Mr. Dijkgraaf emerged as the preferred candidate because of his "rigorous intellect, matchless talent as a scientist, thinker, and teacher, along with the depth and breadth of his experience as an institutional administrator."
Going to Princeton "feels like a very natural next step to take," Mr. Dijkgraaf says. He attributes his research success in part to spending some formative years there, both at Princeton University and at the institute, in the early 1990s. "It set the course of the rest of my career," he says. "I remember very well my first visit. I felt I was going to the next level."
He was thrown into collaboration with Edward Witten, a renowned theoretical physicist who still works at the institute and who has made key advances in string theory.
The institute has plenty of fellows who have changed the course of scientific and everyday life. But not all of them possess Mr. Dijkgraaf's ability to explain what he does—and his work is indeed arcane—in language that might captivate colleagues in any field. While a news release speaks of his finding "surprising and deep connections between matrix models, string theory, topological string theory, and supersymmetric quantum field theory," Mr. Dijkgraaf puts it this way: "My research crosses and connects the fields of physics and mathematics."
Physics, he says, has moved into "this bizarre world of quantum mechanics, of elementary particles which behave very differently than in our everyday intuition," and yet discoveries about not only particles but also black holes and an expanding universe "can be entirely cast in very natural mathematical formulas and symbols."
He adds: "The wonder is that mathematics that we developed almost at room temperature, just using objects in our immediate sphere, can be applied to the full universe or to the smallest constituents."
The ability to communicate scientific ideas has made Mr. Dijkgraaf a popular figure in the Netherlands. He has a column in a Dutch newspaper and appears on a popular television show to promote young colleagues and their scientific research.
He also started a Dutch-language Web site on physics for children, Proefjes.nl. "When I was a kid, whenever I read something or understood something, I really felt the urge to share that with others," he says. He even married a communicator, the novelist Pia de Jong.
Explaining science to anyone who is interested will be an emphasis of his leadership at the institute, Mr. Dijkgraaf says. "We are creative in the ways we approach research, continuously thinking of ways to collaborate and ways to experiment and communicate. I often approach outreach, connecting to the public at large, in the same way."
July 10, 2011
Anthropologist Puts an Idaho Museum's Many Bones Within Virtual Reach
Animal-bone specimens are in high demand. But researchers
eager for access to them far outnumber the supply of such repositories.
One anthropologists's solution: Share his animal bones. Herbert D.G. Maschner, a research professor of anthropology at Idaho State University, set about providing access to his, online.
That is among the accomplishments that have won him an appointment this spring as the director of the Idaho Museum of Natural History, in Pocatello. Jointly run by the university, where it is located, and the State of Idaho, the museum is Idaho's official institution for life sciences, earth sciences, anthropology, and natural-history education.
One of the things Mr. Maschner, who is 52, wanted to be sure of is that the museum's treasures were accessible not just to those who found their way to Pocatello. As interim director since June 2010, he has been developing the ambitious Virtual Zooarchaeology of the Arctic Project. That online, interactive, virtual museum of animal bones provides anyone who is interested with thousands of two- and three-dimensional images, from micro to macro level, of skeletal anatomies from all over the North American Arctic and Greenland: fish, birds, and mammals.
Mr. Maschner set up the database with Matthew Betts, a colleague at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. They reasoned that few institutions can afford to set up an extensive reference collection of such material, so they determined "to put entire collections online," Mr. Maschner says, "so that a scientist in the Ukraine, for example, who wants to study our mammoth bones can get online and do comparative anatomy with his own materials from the ice age of the Central Russian plains."
With funds from the National Science Foundation, they scanned and provided access to the Idaho museum's own materials, along with many items from the Arctic collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Washington, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and other institutions, using Idaho State's state-of-the-art scanning facility.
The virtual-research approach is one that Mr. Maschner will bring to the Idaho museum in any way he can, he says. For example, he is overseeing the creation of another virtual collection, this one of 70,000 pressed plants in Idaho State's herbarium.
Mr. Maschner says providing access to scientific data to as many interested people as possible—a sort of "democratization of science"—stems from his own broad interests. After earning a bachelor's degree at the University of New Mexico and a master's at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, he entered a doctoral program at the University of California at Santa Barbara. At the time, he says, he was most interested in the global archaeology of warfare among hunter-gatherers.
These days his work encompasses geosciences, life sciences, and social sciences as he analyzes archaeological data from village sites on the Bering Sea and reconstructs the 5,000-year ecosystem history of the North Pacific. From the data he gathers, including half a million bones of fish, birds, and mammals, he gauges past climates, patterns of human harvesting, and other phenomena to determine how the region's history could affect the future of fisheries and endangered species in northern waters.
"Knowing that my research is not just about prehistory, or museums, or creating cool Web sites, but is actually solving problems for modern peoples in modern contexts, even though I'm using sometimes unorthodox data sources," he says, "that's really the highlight for me."
Developing research programs to solve technological problems—and multitasking—underpin much of what he does. To determine what his specimens reveal about climate, marine health, and feeding levels of fish and mammals of the North Pacific, he set up Idaho State's Center for Archaeology, Materials, and Applied Spectroscopy, which he also directs. He is a senior scientist at the university's Idaho Accelerator Center. There he developed a technique for making artifacts and bones briefly radioactive so he can analyze their makeup while preserving the bones' integrity, a crucial consideration for many indigenous corporations and tribes.
He is also an associate editor of the Journal of World Prehistory, and a board member and science adviser of a foundation that seeks to preserve the Mirador Basin, in Guatemala, the cradle of Mayan civilization. His honors include being named the Idaho Academy of Science's Distinguished Scientist of 2011. As he runs the museum and works on his university research, he will continue to teach (but just one course a year) at Idaho State, and to supervise graduate students.
How will he find the time to continue these projects and be full-time director of the Idaho Museum of Natural History? Excellent staff, for starters, he says. And "I get up at about 4 o'clock every morning." He speaks a mile a minute. Has to. Stuff to do. "
If I have only one thing going, and it starts to go smooth, things get terrible," Mr. Maschner says. "So I like to have three or four things going simultaneously, which keeps me enthused about all of them."
One anthropologists's solution: Share his animal bones. Herbert D.G. Maschner, a research professor of anthropology at Idaho State University, set about providing access to his, online.
That is among the accomplishments that have won him an appointment this spring as the director of the Idaho Museum of Natural History, in Pocatello. Jointly run by the university, where it is located, and the State of Idaho, the museum is Idaho's official institution for life sciences, earth sciences, anthropology, and natural-history education.
One of the things Mr. Maschner, who is 52, wanted to be sure of is that the museum's treasures were accessible not just to those who found their way to Pocatello. As interim director since June 2010, he has been developing the ambitious Virtual Zooarchaeology of the Arctic Project. That online, interactive, virtual museum of animal bones provides anyone who is interested with thousands of two- and three-dimensional images, from micro to macro level, of skeletal anatomies from all over the North American Arctic and Greenland: fish, birds, and mammals.
Mr. Maschner set up the database with Matthew Betts, a colleague at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. They reasoned that few institutions can afford to set up an extensive reference collection of such material, so they determined "to put entire collections online," Mr. Maschner says, "so that a scientist in the Ukraine, for example, who wants to study our mammoth bones can get online and do comparative anatomy with his own materials from the ice age of the Central Russian plains."
With funds from the National Science Foundation, they scanned and provided access to the Idaho museum's own materials, along with many items from the Arctic collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Washington, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and other institutions, using Idaho State's state-of-the-art scanning facility.
The virtual-research approach is one that Mr. Maschner will bring to the Idaho museum in any way he can, he says. For example, he is overseeing the creation of another virtual collection, this one of 70,000 pressed plants in Idaho State's herbarium.
Mr. Maschner says providing access to scientific data to as many interested people as possible—a sort of "democratization of science"—stems from his own broad interests. After earning a bachelor's degree at the University of New Mexico and a master's at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, he entered a doctoral program at the University of California at Santa Barbara. At the time, he says, he was most interested in the global archaeology of warfare among hunter-gatherers.
These days his work encompasses geosciences, life sciences, and social sciences as he analyzes archaeological data from village sites on the Bering Sea and reconstructs the 5,000-year ecosystem history of the North Pacific. From the data he gathers, including half a million bones of fish, birds, and mammals, he gauges past climates, patterns of human harvesting, and other phenomena to determine how the region's history could affect the future of fisheries and endangered species in northern waters.
"Knowing that my research is not just about prehistory, or museums, or creating cool Web sites, but is actually solving problems for modern peoples in modern contexts, even though I'm using sometimes unorthodox data sources," he says, "that's really the highlight for me."
Developing research programs to solve technological problems—and multitasking—underpin much of what he does. To determine what his specimens reveal about climate, marine health, and feeding levels of fish and mammals of the North Pacific, he set up Idaho State's Center for Archaeology, Materials, and Applied Spectroscopy, which he also directs. He is a senior scientist at the university's Idaho Accelerator Center. There he developed a technique for making artifacts and bones briefly radioactive so he can analyze their makeup while preserving the bones' integrity, a crucial consideration for many indigenous corporations and tribes.
He is also an associate editor of the Journal of World Prehistory, and a board member and science adviser of a foundation that seeks to preserve the Mirador Basin, in Guatemala, the cradle of Mayan civilization. His honors include being named the Idaho Academy of Science's Distinguished Scientist of 2011. As he runs the museum and works on his university research, he will continue to teach (but just one course a year) at Idaho State, and to supervise graduate students.
How will he find the time to continue these projects and be full-time director of the Idaho Museum of Natural History? Excellent staff, for starters, he says. And "I get up at about 4 o'clock every morning." He speaks a mile a minute. Has to. Stuff to do. "
If I have only one thing going, and it starts to go smooth, things get terrible," Mr. Maschner says. "So I like to have three or four things going simultaneously, which keeps me enthused about all of them."
April 17, 2011
Professor Helps Cultivate the Business Skills of the Chickasaw Nation
Members of the Chickasaw Nation, in Oklahoma, are always in
the market for good advice on how to run their many businesses, which
include a racetrack, a casino, a natural-gas station, radio stations,
and a chocolate factory.
So the Nation, whose territory encompasses all or part of 13 counties in the state, gave East Central University, in Ada, a gift to establish an endowed professorship in business administration.
Karli J. Peterson became its first recipient this year.
An associate professor of business, she has long run courses and workshops to help the Nation's citizens and other residents of the region to run companies small and large. For example, in one course she teaches approaches to collaborating within a multigenerational work force. In another, on team development, she works with two colleagues: One teaches, another analyzes data about what students demonstrate they have learned in the course, and Ms. Peterson writes up the results for publication.
For many years, members of the Chickasaw Nation have been attending East Central and other Oklahoma colleges and universities, and the Nation's governor, Bill Anoatubby, is a graduate in business and accounting from East Central who has also completed graduate courses there. Mr. Anoatubby has been a leader of unusual drive and efficacy. Since becoming the Nation's 30th governor in 1987, he has increased its $11-million annual budget and 250 employees to 11,500 employees and capital outlays of $750-million a year.
Mr. Anoatubby's primary goal "is to improve the Chickasaw people," Ms. Peterson says, "and education is a very direct path to improving people's lives. He really focuses on input, on asking for the best advice, getting the best people, and reaching the best decision." The Nation's gift of $125,000 in 2008 for her endowed chair is part of a much larger effort. It has dedicated more than $15-million to education this year, financing, among other things, an extensive college-scholarship program for Chickasaw students in the hope that they will not only succeed but "will have an impact on the world around them," Mr. Anoatubby said.
Ms. Peterson's educational trajectory speaks of a similar can-do spirit. After growing up in Montana and North Dakota, where populations are sparse but the sky is high, she earned an undergraduate degree in accounting from Moorhead State University, then a master's in business administration from Central Michigan University.
She came to East Central in 2001 from North Dakota, where she had worked as both a college professor and senior federal-credit-union official. Some former colleagues had got jobs at East Central, and, she recalls, "they called and said, 'Send your application—there's an opening in business.' So we all live in the same place again."
She then decided that a doctorate would serve her well. She asked colleagues to relate their experiences of getting one. "That information scared me," she says. "It was so expensive, and there were so many people who said they'd be done in a certain amount of time, and another year went by, and another year.
"I thought, 'No, I don't want to go that route.'"
She called several online, for-profit institutions, including Capella University. Instructors and officials there told her that the institution had a high dropout rate in the first quarter, she said. "It was huge, about 80 percent," she recalls, "but they said that the 20 percent who were left were pretty dedicated. So I thought, 'OK, I'll be in that other 20 percent.' "
She says she enjoyed attending colloquia around the country to meet her instructors in person, and the collegiality she discovered among students: "We'd be doing assignments, and we'd call each other on the phone, and say, 'Oh, it's midnight, but I just assumed you'd still be working on this assignment.'
"I loved that experience."
She started her doctorate in 2004 and finished it in 2007, just shy of her self-imposed deadline. She explains: "My research was on angel investors, and those are really wealthy, busy people. I was living here in Ada, Okla., and interviewing people in the U.K., and on the East Coast and the West Coast. Hooking all that up took me three extra months."
"That doctorate almost killed me," she admits. "I say I enjoyed it, but it was really rugged. I had absolutely nothing else I did. I went to work and worked on my Ph.D. That was it."
But she says that has made her more understanding of the many competing responsibilities her Chickasaw students must juggle as well as their diverse educational needs. Some are potential degree-earning students for East Central, while others are businesspeople looking to develop particular skills. Her philosophy, she says, is simple: "To me it's a requirement that you step up to the plate, and help people out."
Mike Peters
So the Nation, whose territory encompasses all or part of 13 counties in the state, gave East Central University, in Ada, a gift to establish an endowed professorship in business administration.
Karli J. Peterson became its first recipient this year.
An associate professor of business, she has long run courses and workshops to help the Nation's citizens and other residents of the region to run companies small and large. For example, in one course she teaches approaches to collaborating within a multigenerational work force. In another, on team development, she works with two colleagues: One teaches, another analyzes data about what students demonstrate they have learned in the course, and Ms. Peterson writes up the results for publication.
For many years, members of the Chickasaw Nation have been attending East Central and other Oklahoma colleges and universities, and the Nation's governor, Bill Anoatubby, is a graduate in business and accounting from East Central who has also completed graduate courses there. Mr. Anoatubby has been a leader of unusual drive and efficacy. Since becoming the Nation's 30th governor in 1987, he has increased its $11-million annual budget and 250 employees to 11,500 employees and capital outlays of $750-million a year.
Mr. Anoatubby's primary goal "is to improve the Chickasaw people," Ms. Peterson says, "and education is a very direct path to improving people's lives. He really focuses on input, on asking for the best advice, getting the best people, and reaching the best decision." The Nation's gift of $125,000 in 2008 for her endowed chair is part of a much larger effort. It has dedicated more than $15-million to education this year, financing, among other things, an extensive college-scholarship program for Chickasaw students in the hope that they will not only succeed but "will have an impact on the world around them," Mr. Anoatubby said.
Ms. Peterson's educational trajectory speaks of a similar can-do spirit. After growing up in Montana and North Dakota, where populations are sparse but the sky is high, she earned an undergraduate degree in accounting from Moorhead State University, then a master's in business administration from Central Michigan University.
She came to East Central in 2001 from North Dakota, where she had worked as both a college professor and senior federal-credit-union official. Some former colleagues had got jobs at East Central, and, she recalls, "they called and said, 'Send your application—there's an opening in business.' So we all live in the same place again."
She then decided that a doctorate would serve her well. She asked colleagues to relate their experiences of getting one. "That information scared me," she says. "It was so expensive, and there were so many people who said they'd be done in a certain amount of time, and another year went by, and another year.
"I thought, 'No, I don't want to go that route.'"
She called several online, for-profit institutions, including Capella University. Instructors and officials there told her that the institution had a high dropout rate in the first quarter, she said. "It was huge, about 80 percent," she recalls, "but they said that the 20 percent who were left were pretty dedicated. So I thought, 'OK, I'll be in that other 20 percent.' "
She says she enjoyed attending colloquia around the country to meet her instructors in person, and the collegiality she discovered among students: "We'd be doing assignments, and we'd call each other on the phone, and say, 'Oh, it's midnight, but I just assumed you'd still be working on this assignment.'
"I loved that experience."
She started her doctorate in 2004 and finished it in 2007, just shy of her self-imposed deadline. She explains: "My research was on angel investors, and those are really wealthy, busy people. I was living here in Ada, Okla., and interviewing people in the U.K., and on the East Coast and the West Coast. Hooking all that up took me three extra months."
"That doctorate almost killed me," she admits. "I say I enjoyed it, but it was really rugged. I had absolutely nothing else I did. I went to work and worked on my Ph.D. That was it."
But she says that has made her more understanding of the many competing responsibilities her Chickasaw students must juggle as well as their diverse educational needs. Some are potential degree-earning students for East Central, while others are businesspeople looking to develop particular skills. Her philosophy, she says, is simple: "To me it's a requirement that you step up to the plate, and help people out."
February 27, 2011
A Historian Devotes Himself to Urging, and Guiding, Colleagues to Teach Better
Mike Peters
Listening to historians is what got Kenneth R. Bain, the
first fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Teaching and Learning Institute at
Bryn Mawr College, interested in how students learn. "Frankly," he says,
"I had some colleagues who had Ph.D.'s in history who couldn't think
historically. Their whole approach was just to memorize endless pieces
of information."
Along with being a historian who has written several books on 20th-century political history, Mr. Bain, 69, is an expert on how learning takes place at universities, and how academics and administrators can foster better teaching.
This academic year he is passing his insights on to 12 faculty members from Bryn Mawr and nearby Haverford College. Among his ideas: Allow students to work together and to revise their work before grading. Generate assignments that intrigue them, prompt them to learn material thoroughly, and become habituated to disciplinary modes of thought. Be aware not only of the nuances of disciplinary thinking, but also of the social, political, and economic forces that influence learning.
Learning "is not a simple matter," he says. "There's reassurance in acknowledging how complex it really is."
Mr. Bain's fellowship recognizes both his practical work and his research in college-level pedagogy, which he encapsulated in his 2004 book, published by Harvard University Press, What the Best College Teachers Do.
A professor of history at Montclair State University, Mr. Bain also serves as that institution's vice provost for university learning and teaching, and directs the Research Academy for University Learning, which he founded in 2006. He has also founded teaching-and-learning centers at New York, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt Universities.
At each center, he has helped colleagues use research findings on pedagogy to become better instructors and to motivate their students and free them from such impediments as the expectation of failure that burdens students of some socioeconomic backgrounds. He also lends professors a hand in redesigning their courses and syllabi.
While at Bryn Mawr, he will try to spread the word on improved teaching and learning by guest editing Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, a new online journal supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Some of the motivation for his life's work came when he was an undergraduate at Baylor University and a graduate student at the Universities of North Texas and Texas at Austin. Recalling the teaching practices at those three institutions, he says, "I flourished under the best of them and languished under the worst of them."
By the time he started teaching, in the late 1960s, research findings on learning were plentiful, but, he noticed, college instructors largely ignored them. He began reading voraciously about influences on learning, ones "that go far beyond students' native abilities and even beyond what teachers might do," he says. Over time, he came to find especially helpful the work of the social psychologists Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan on how to stimulate students' intrinsic appetite for doing well.
Armed with such research, about 20 years ago Mr. Bain set out to entice, urge, and—rarely, he says—pester colleagues to improve their teaching skills and then mentor their colleagues in upgrading theirs.
From the outset, he included students in that process by having them advise professors on what works. One of the places he did that was Northwestern, where he built on the momentum of Gerald Graff, a pioneer there of a national "teaching and learning" movement of the 1980s.
Even though the thinking about teaching has become far more sophisticated over the past two decades, considerable challenges in spreading that knowledge remain. Among them is the defensiveness of many colleagues. And yet, Mr. Bain says, his program at Montclair State has always been overenrolled. From 50 to 60 applicants, it selects 24 a year: 12 tenure-track faculty members and 12 senior professors who serve as mentors.
Meredyth Krych Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychology who went through Mr. Bain's program at Montclair, says the training helped her realize that students can grapple with complex topics and higher-order reasoning right from the beginning of courses. "The key is to engage them in real issues that are debated in my field, to stimulate natural curiosity and get students invested in their own success," she says by e-mail.
How does Mr. Bain coax his wards to reveal their teaching habits, surrender their syllabi, and get some coaching?
Avoid the specialized jargon of pedagogy research, he advises; instead, use language that colleagues are comfortable with.
And point out how little the disciplinary preparation of instructors has helped them to understand university learning and how best to cultivate it. "That makes it less threatening to them."
He also has a ready argument for administrators wondering how to fit such efforts into tight budgets: "Most universities recognize that in a student-driven academic marketplace, where students have so many choices in where they can go, it is incumbent upon the institution to expend the effort to improve the quality of teaching and learning."
Along with being a historian who has written several books on 20th-century political history, Mr. Bain, 69, is an expert on how learning takes place at universities, and how academics and administrators can foster better teaching.
This academic year he is passing his insights on to 12 faculty members from Bryn Mawr and nearby Haverford College. Among his ideas: Allow students to work together and to revise their work before grading. Generate assignments that intrigue them, prompt them to learn material thoroughly, and become habituated to disciplinary modes of thought. Be aware not only of the nuances of disciplinary thinking, but also of the social, political, and economic forces that influence learning.
Learning "is not a simple matter," he says. "There's reassurance in acknowledging how complex it really is."
Mr. Bain's fellowship recognizes both his practical work and his research in college-level pedagogy, which he encapsulated in his 2004 book, published by Harvard University Press, What the Best College Teachers Do.
A professor of history at Montclair State University, Mr. Bain also serves as that institution's vice provost for university learning and teaching, and directs the Research Academy for University Learning, which he founded in 2006. He has also founded teaching-and-learning centers at New York, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt Universities.
At each center, he has helped colleagues use research findings on pedagogy to become better instructors and to motivate their students and free them from such impediments as the expectation of failure that burdens students of some socioeconomic backgrounds. He also lends professors a hand in redesigning their courses and syllabi.
While at Bryn Mawr, he will try to spread the word on improved teaching and learning by guest editing Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, a new online journal supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Some of the motivation for his life's work came when he was an undergraduate at Baylor University and a graduate student at the Universities of North Texas and Texas at Austin. Recalling the teaching practices at those three institutions, he says, "I flourished under the best of them and languished under the worst of them."
By the time he started teaching, in the late 1960s, research findings on learning were plentiful, but, he noticed, college instructors largely ignored them. He began reading voraciously about influences on learning, ones "that go far beyond students' native abilities and even beyond what teachers might do," he says. Over time, he came to find especially helpful the work of the social psychologists Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan on how to stimulate students' intrinsic appetite for doing well.
Armed with such research, about 20 years ago Mr. Bain set out to entice, urge, and—rarely, he says—pester colleagues to improve their teaching skills and then mentor their colleagues in upgrading theirs.
From the outset, he included students in that process by having them advise professors on what works. One of the places he did that was Northwestern, where he built on the momentum of Gerald Graff, a pioneer there of a national "teaching and learning" movement of the 1980s.
Even though the thinking about teaching has become far more sophisticated over the past two decades, considerable challenges in spreading that knowledge remain. Among them is the defensiveness of many colleagues. And yet, Mr. Bain says, his program at Montclair State has always been overenrolled. From 50 to 60 applicants, it selects 24 a year: 12 tenure-track faculty members and 12 senior professors who serve as mentors.
Meredyth Krych Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychology who went through Mr. Bain's program at Montclair, says the training helped her realize that students can grapple with complex topics and higher-order reasoning right from the beginning of courses. "The key is to engage them in real issues that are debated in my field, to stimulate natural curiosity and get students invested in their own success," she says by e-mail.
How does Mr. Bain coax his wards to reveal their teaching habits, surrender their syllabi, and get some coaching?
Avoid the specialized jargon of pedagogy research, he advises; instead, use language that colleagues are comfortable with.
And point out how little the disciplinary preparation of instructors has helped them to understand university learning and how best to cultivate it. "That makes it less threatening to them."
He also has a ready argument for administrators wondering how to fit such efforts into tight budgets: "Most universities recognize that in a student-driven academic marketplace, where students have so many choices in where they can go, it is incumbent upon the institution to expend the effort to improve the quality of teaching and learning."
February 20, 2011
Boston College Mourns a Former Leader Who Helped Bring It Prominence
It is a rare college administrator who can save his
institution from financial ruin, then lift it to national prominence
through an ambitious construction program that transforms the campus
into one that attracts high-caliber professors and students.
Even rarer is the administrator who can do all that and win respect and affection from fellow administrators, trustees, students, alumni, and faculty and staff members.
Boston College has lost one such leader, Francis B. (Frank) Campanella, who in the 1970s played a crucial role in resuscitating what was then a troubled Roman Catholic institution.
From 1973 to 1991, and again from 1993 to 2001, Mr. Campanella served as executive vice president of the college, responsible for day-to-day and long-range management. He died in Boston on January 14 at the age of 74 from complications after a stroke.
He was still teaching finance at the college until just before his death. The institution's chancellor, the Rev. J. Donald Monan, wrote in remembrance of his colleague and close friend that he led by "successfully addressing not only the university's physical needs, but its spirit as well."
In 1973, Father Monan, then Boston College's president, recruited Mr. Campanella from the business faculty to the executive vice presidency, believing he could play a key role in reviving an institution racked by near insolvency, student unrest, and low faculty morale. The college had been running severe deficits for years, had not increased faculty salaries for three straight years, and had an endowment of a mere $5-million. It needed, says Father Monan, to replace a century-old way of operating with modern, professional management practices.
Mr. Campanella provided those. Under his management, the college never ran a deficit, its faculty salaries sprang to a high level in national rankings, and its endowment increased two-hundredfold, making it one of the nation's wealthiest universities.
When he came to Boston College in 1970, he already had varied experience outside of academe. He had grown up in Boston in difficult circumstances, but performed well enough at Catholic schools to win a scholarship to study at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before serving for three years as a lieutenant in the Marines.
He then worked in the construction industry, where he learned management skills, before studying for a master's degree in business administration at Babson College and then a doctorate in that field from Harvard University.
He started out on the college's business faculty. Mr. Campanella recalled, in a 2001 interview in a campus publication that when Father Monan approached him at a faculty reception and asked him to become the college's executive vice president, "I really didn't want to undertake another career change, but Father Monan was very persuasive."
According to colleagues, Mr. Campanella's philosophy was, "If you create the buildings, the good faculty members and students will come." He began by raising tuition and controlling operating costs so he could produce operating surpluses and invest them in the endowment. That strategy built the college's debt capacity, which he used to finance new construction—$456-million of it—during his tenure.
From a regional college in 1973, Boston College became an institution with a national and international draw: During the Campanella era, its campus came to boast 30 residence halls and many other new and renovated facilities.
His reforms at Boston College also came to influence the way many American institutions of higher education managed themselves. He and his colleagues devised a practice of "enrollment management"—systematically integrating recruitment, financial aid, demographic research, and retention efforts—and he did that so successfully that his chief partner in the undertaking, John Maguire, who now leads his own consulting company, has called Mr. Campanella the country's "founding godfather" of the approach.
At Boston College, Mr. Campanella and Father Monan were often at pains to credit one another, and a small group of other administrators from the early 1970s, for the college's revival. Father Monan, who arrived at the campus in 1972, had, for example, transformed the college's board of trustees by bringing on lay people with professional management experience. But he said last month that, to usher in change, he needed the support of like-minded colleagues, and found one in Mr. Campanella. His choice for his executive vice president had attended a Jesuit high school, he said, and so came to the campus with a keen sense of such Jesuit values as learning, service, and "finding God in all things."
In his homily at Mr. Campanella's funeral, Father Monan said: "Frank could no more separate the business planner in him from the academic than he could separate the professional in him from the man of faith and integrity."
Even rarer is the administrator who can do all that and win respect and affection from fellow administrators, trustees, students, alumni, and faculty and staff members.
Boston College has lost one such leader, Francis B. (Frank) Campanella, who in the 1970s played a crucial role in resuscitating what was then a troubled Roman Catholic institution.
From 1973 to 1991, and again from 1993 to 2001, Mr. Campanella served as executive vice president of the college, responsible for day-to-day and long-range management. He died in Boston on January 14 at the age of 74 from complications after a stroke.
He was still teaching finance at the college until just before his death. The institution's chancellor, the Rev. J. Donald Monan, wrote in remembrance of his colleague and close friend that he led by "successfully addressing not only the university's physical needs, but its spirit as well."
In 1973, Father Monan, then Boston College's president, recruited Mr. Campanella from the business faculty to the executive vice presidency, believing he could play a key role in reviving an institution racked by near insolvency, student unrest, and low faculty morale. The college had been running severe deficits for years, had not increased faculty salaries for three straight years, and had an endowment of a mere $5-million. It needed, says Father Monan, to replace a century-old way of operating with modern, professional management practices.
Mr. Campanella provided those. Under his management, the college never ran a deficit, its faculty salaries sprang to a high level in national rankings, and its endowment increased two-hundredfold, making it one of the nation's wealthiest universities.
When he came to Boston College in 1970, he already had varied experience outside of academe. He had grown up in Boston in difficult circumstances, but performed well enough at Catholic schools to win a scholarship to study at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before serving for three years as a lieutenant in the Marines.
He then worked in the construction industry, where he learned management skills, before studying for a master's degree in business administration at Babson College and then a doctorate in that field from Harvard University.
He started out on the college's business faculty. Mr. Campanella recalled, in a 2001 interview in a campus publication that when Father Monan approached him at a faculty reception and asked him to become the college's executive vice president, "I really didn't want to undertake another career change, but Father Monan was very persuasive."
According to colleagues, Mr. Campanella's philosophy was, "If you create the buildings, the good faculty members and students will come." He began by raising tuition and controlling operating costs so he could produce operating surpluses and invest them in the endowment. That strategy built the college's debt capacity, which he used to finance new construction—$456-million of it—during his tenure.
From a regional college in 1973, Boston College became an institution with a national and international draw: During the Campanella era, its campus came to boast 30 residence halls and many other new and renovated facilities.
His reforms at Boston College also came to influence the way many American institutions of higher education managed themselves. He and his colleagues devised a practice of "enrollment management"—systematically integrating recruitment, financial aid, demographic research, and retention efforts—and he did that so successfully that his chief partner in the undertaking, John Maguire, who now leads his own consulting company, has called Mr. Campanella the country's "founding godfather" of the approach.
At Boston College, Mr. Campanella and Father Monan were often at pains to credit one another, and a small group of other administrators from the early 1970s, for the college's revival. Father Monan, who arrived at the campus in 1972, had, for example, transformed the college's board of trustees by bringing on lay people with professional management experience. But he said last month that, to usher in change, he needed the support of like-minded colleagues, and found one in Mr. Campanella. His choice for his executive vice president had attended a Jesuit high school, he said, and so came to the campus with a keen sense of such Jesuit values as learning, service, and "finding God in all things."
In his homily at Mr. Campanella's funeral, Father Monan said: "Frank could no more separate the business planner in him from the academic than he could separate the professional in him from the man of faith and integrity."
October 31, 2010
Notre Dame Enlists an Irish-Literature Expert From the Emerald Isle
Declan Kiberd likes teaching Americans about Irish literature
and culture because they may come up with some odd but compelling
readings of texts.
Some years ago, for instance, one California literature student, taking a course with him in Dublin, asked why Leopold Bloom, the central character of James Joyce's Ulysses, spent so much time walking around Dublin. Was he ill? Walking something off?
Mr. Kiberd, a leading Anglo-Irish literary scholar, expects he will get more queries of that sort when he takes his new post as the endowed, tenured Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Beginning in the spring semester, he'll be presenting early-20th-century Irish life to students from car-crazy America, where, he quips, walking may seem "a strange or perverse activity."
Recalling his pupil's puzzlement raises a chuckle from Mr. Kiberd (pronounced KIE-bd), one of Ireland's most prominent intellectuals. He relishes the episode, too: "She ended up writing a wonderful essay showing that Bloom's movements through the city pretty much traced the outline of a question mark.
"She persisted in her bafflement to the point it became wise."
Speaking by phone from his office in Dublin, he says it is that kind of insight by partisan reading that he looks forward to in his post at Notre Dame's Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, which boasts the largest program outside of Ireland for teaching and research in Irish language, literature, and life. He will teach Irish literature and culture to students at the institute's Dublin Center each spring and summer, and then on the South Bend, Ind., campus each fall.
Mr. Kiberd follows two other eminent Irish scholars into the professorship: the critic, poet, and novelist Seamus Deane, who held the post from 1993 to 2004, and then Maud Ellmann, now a literary scholar at the University of Chicago. As it happens, Ms. Ellmann is the daughter of Richard Ellmann, a renowned biographer of Irish literary figures who was Mr. Kiberd's doctoral supervisor at the University of Oxford.
Announcing Mr. Kiberd's appointment, Christopher Fox, director of the Keough-Naughton Institute, said: "It is not an overstatement to say that his presence on the Notre Dame faculty reinforces our position as the world leader in Irish studies for years to come."
Since 1979, Mr. Kiberd, a Dublin native, has taught at University College Dublin, most recently as professor and chair of Anglo-Irish literature and drama. He has published several books about Irish literature and history, as well as Celtic culture.
The literary theorist Edward Said praised Mr. Kiberd's postcolonialist reading of Irish writing, Inventing Ireland: Literature of the Modern Nation (Harvard University Press, 1996), as "a highly readable, joyfully contentious book" of "enormous learning and superb understanding."
As for the institute's accomplishments, it has 400 students enrolled in Irish-language courses and as many as 1,000 undergraduates and 25 graduate students taking institute-crosslisted courses each semester in the departments of anthropology; English; film, television, and theater; Irish language and literature in North America; and political science.
Under Mr. Fox, the institute has recently established a minor in language and literature in the Irish language, and a major is planned. It has 19 permanent, affiliated faculty members, with many distinguished visitors each year.
All that thrills him, says Mr. Kiberd: "I've always been amphibious. I work both in Irish and in English, so this is a great attraction for me, to have students working on the cusp between both languages, and also to be working on the cusp with such disciplines as history, sociology, and political science.
"My own work has been very much involved not just with the Irish language but also with postcolonial theory—with comparison of various modernisms in Europe with Latin America and so on. And these approaches are favored by many of the colleagues at Notre Dame."
Notre Dame students interested in Ireland seem to share that orientation, too, he says: "American students—many of whom have an Irish element in their background, often mingled with some other element, too—are natural comparativists and also are often incredibly curious to find out more."
He expects to benefit as much as students and fellow researchers at the home of the Fighting Irish. "The emigrant Irish have always held on to many traditions that the homegrown Irish have lost in recent decades," Mr. Kiberd says. "So I expect to reconnect through the students with some of my lost traditions."
Some years ago, for instance, one California literature student, taking a course with him in Dublin, asked why Leopold Bloom, the central character of James Joyce's Ulysses, spent so much time walking around Dublin. Was he ill? Walking something off?
Mr. Kiberd, a leading Anglo-Irish literary scholar, expects he will get more queries of that sort when he takes his new post as the endowed, tenured Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Beginning in the spring semester, he'll be presenting early-20th-century Irish life to students from car-crazy America, where, he quips, walking may seem "a strange or perverse activity."
Recalling his pupil's puzzlement raises a chuckle from Mr. Kiberd (pronounced KIE-bd), one of Ireland's most prominent intellectuals. He relishes the episode, too: "She ended up writing a wonderful essay showing that Bloom's movements through the city pretty much traced the outline of a question mark.
"She persisted in her bafflement to the point it became wise."
Speaking by phone from his office in Dublin, he says it is that kind of insight by partisan reading that he looks forward to in his post at Notre Dame's Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, which boasts the largest program outside of Ireland for teaching and research in Irish language, literature, and life. He will teach Irish literature and culture to students at the institute's Dublin Center each spring and summer, and then on the South Bend, Ind., campus each fall.
Mr. Kiberd follows two other eminent Irish scholars into the professorship: the critic, poet, and novelist Seamus Deane, who held the post from 1993 to 2004, and then Maud Ellmann, now a literary scholar at the University of Chicago. As it happens, Ms. Ellmann is the daughter of Richard Ellmann, a renowned biographer of Irish literary figures who was Mr. Kiberd's doctoral supervisor at the University of Oxford.
Announcing Mr. Kiberd's appointment, Christopher Fox, director of the Keough-Naughton Institute, said: "It is not an overstatement to say that his presence on the Notre Dame faculty reinforces our position as the world leader in Irish studies for years to come."
Since 1979, Mr. Kiberd, a Dublin native, has taught at University College Dublin, most recently as professor and chair of Anglo-Irish literature and drama. He has published several books about Irish literature and history, as well as Celtic culture.
The literary theorist Edward Said praised Mr. Kiberd's postcolonialist reading of Irish writing, Inventing Ireland: Literature of the Modern Nation (Harvard University Press, 1996), as "a highly readable, joyfully contentious book" of "enormous learning and superb understanding."
As for the institute's accomplishments, it has 400 students enrolled in Irish-language courses and as many as 1,000 undergraduates and 25 graduate students taking institute-crosslisted courses each semester in the departments of anthropology; English; film, television, and theater; Irish language and literature in North America; and political science.
Under Mr. Fox, the institute has recently established a minor in language and literature in the Irish language, and a major is planned. It has 19 permanent, affiliated faculty members, with many distinguished visitors each year.
All that thrills him, says Mr. Kiberd: "I've always been amphibious. I work both in Irish and in English, so this is a great attraction for me, to have students working on the cusp between both languages, and also to be working on the cusp with such disciplines as history, sociology, and political science.
"My own work has been very much involved not just with the Irish language but also with postcolonial theory—with comparison of various modernisms in Europe with Latin America and so on. And these approaches are favored by many of the colleagues at Notre Dame."
Notre Dame students interested in Ireland seem to share that orientation, too, he says: "American students—many of whom have an Irish element in their background, often mingled with some other element, too—are natural comparativists and also are often incredibly curious to find out more."
He expects to benefit as much as students and fellow researchers at the home of the Fighting Irish. "The emigrant Irish have always held on to many traditions that the homegrown Irish have lost in recent decades," Mr. Kiberd says. "So I expect to reconnect through the students with some of my lost traditions."
October 10, 2010
A Botanist Extends Her Father's Conservationist Legacy
Estella B. Leopold, this year's recipient of the prestigious
International Cosmos Prize for contributions to conservation, nominates a
list of family members who, she says, are more deserving of recognition
than she is.
Each year the Japan-based Expo '90 Foundation makes the award, which includes a medallion and 40 million yen (about $480,000), to a person who has advanced "the harmonious coexistence of nature and mankind."
Ms. Leopold, an emeritus professor of botany at the University of Washington, where she has taught and done research for 35 years, has certainly done that.
But "a lot of what I worked on spun off from knowing my dad's legacy," says the daughter of Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), author of A Sand County Almanac (1949), a key text of American conservationism.
And there have been her three brothers, now deceased, and one sister, she continues: "They have done more than I have in conservation." They spent many weekends on the 80 acres of woods and fields around a shack their father fashioned from an unused chicken shed on the Wisconsin River, north of Madison, Wis.
Together the siblings and like-minded conservationists founded the Aldo Leopold Foundation, in 1982, to promote ecologically sound land practices. Its credo is the "land ethic" that, as Aldo Leopold wrote, "simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land."
Ms. Leopold has worked tirelessly for that cause, both in her full-time academic role and as a part-time ecological activist. "It has been fun working on and off in conservation," she says.
And productive. In the 1960s, she lobbied successfully to have 6,000 acres of wilderness in Colorado, the Florissant Fossil Beds, declared a national monument to protect it from real-estate development. At about 8,400 feet above sea level, the tract is an ancient, well-preserved lake bottom where fossils of more than 1,500 species have been found.
Also in the 1960s, Ms. Leopold's research into the effects of dam construction helped a coalition of conservation groups to block the damming of the Colorado River in the lower Grand Canyon.
After the Mount St. Helens volcanic explosion, in 1980, she worked doggedly to have that area, too, designated a national monument, to prevent replanting for commercial forestry. She led researchers and environmentalists who succeeded in having the area preserved in its volcano-altered state. That, she said in her Cosmos acceptance statement—echoing her testimony to a Congressional hearing at the time—would show "how the ecosystem would recover and inform us about the earth's natural healing processes."
The Cosmos Prize citation praised Ms. Leopold for being among those "few individuals who span generations and show others how humans can live in harmony with the land." Still, her career has primarily been in paleontology—specifically, paleobotany. "I've been part of citizen movements, and my work is in paleo," she says from her office, in Seattle. In 1948 she earned a degree in botany from the University of Wisconsin before obtaining a master's degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in plant sciences from Yale University, in 1956. Her research has also focused on forest history, restoration ecology, and environmental quality, and she is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (1974) and the American Philosophical Society (2000).
Among her accomplishments has been to pioneer the analysis of fossilized pollen, like the kind preserved for 34 million years at Florissant. "You need to bring good science to bear on conservation decisions," she says.
She plans to give half of her prize money to the Aldo Leopold Foundation, to continue its work, "to honor Dad," she says. His steadily selling A Sand County Almanac—now translated into 11 languages—brings the organization $40,000 a year in royalties. The Leopolds also publish a magazine and popular handbooks on the ecological management of woodlands. Foundation personnel give seminars and lectures to general, professional, and governmental audiences, and are nearing completion of an hourlong film, Green Fire, on the land-ethic concept. "We should allow the land to speak," Ms. Leopold said in her Cosmos acceptance speech.
Still an active scholar at 83, she will spend some of the remaining prize money on a new microscope for her laboratory at Washington. "You're never too old for good equipment," she says.
What has driven her commitment to conservation all these years? The popularity of the green movement, for starters. "Admittedly it has been only a small segment of the culture, of the United States, that has been interested in ethical treatment of land," she says. "So it's kind of a cult. But it's growing, and God knows we need that."
Each year the Japan-based Expo '90 Foundation makes the award, which includes a medallion and 40 million yen (about $480,000), to a person who has advanced "the harmonious coexistence of nature and mankind."
Ms. Leopold, an emeritus professor of botany at the University of Washington, where she has taught and done research for 35 years, has certainly done that.
But "a lot of what I worked on spun off from knowing my dad's legacy," says the daughter of Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), author of A Sand County Almanac (1949), a key text of American conservationism.
And there have been her three brothers, now deceased, and one sister, she continues: "They have done more than I have in conservation." They spent many weekends on the 80 acres of woods and fields around a shack their father fashioned from an unused chicken shed on the Wisconsin River, north of Madison, Wis.
Together the siblings and like-minded conservationists founded the Aldo Leopold Foundation, in 1982, to promote ecologically sound land practices. Its credo is the "land ethic" that, as Aldo Leopold wrote, "simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land."
Ms. Leopold has worked tirelessly for that cause, both in her full-time academic role and as a part-time ecological activist. "It has been fun working on and off in conservation," she says.
And productive. In the 1960s, she lobbied successfully to have 6,000 acres of wilderness in Colorado, the Florissant Fossil Beds, declared a national monument to protect it from real-estate development. At about 8,400 feet above sea level, the tract is an ancient, well-preserved lake bottom where fossils of more than 1,500 species have been found.
Also in the 1960s, Ms. Leopold's research into the effects of dam construction helped a coalition of conservation groups to block the damming of the Colorado River in the lower Grand Canyon.
After the Mount St. Helens volcanic explosion, in 1980, she worked doggedly to have that area, too, designated a national monument, to prevent replanting for commercial forestry. She led researchers and environmentalists who succeeded in having the area preserved in its volcano-altered state. That, she said in her Cosmos acceptance statement—echoing her testimony to a Congressional hearing at the time—would show "how the ecosystem would recover and inform us about the earth's natural healing processes."
The Cosmos Prize citation praised Ms. Leopold for being among those "few individuals who span generations and show others how humans can live in harmony with the land." Still, her career has primarily been in paleontology—specifically, paleobotany. "I've been part of citizen movements, and my work is in paleo," she says from her office, in Seattle. In 1948 she earned a degree in botany from the University of Wisconsin before obtaining a master's degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in plant sciences from Yale University, in 1956. Her research has also focused on forest history, restoration ecology, and environmental quality, and she is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (1974) and the American Philosophical Society (2000).
Among her accomplishments has been to pioneer the analysis of fossilized pollen, like the kind preserved for 34 million years at Florissant. "You need to bring good science to bear on conservation decisions," she says.
She plans to give half of her prize money to the Aldo Leopold Foundation, to continue its work, "to honor Dad," she says. His steadily selling A Sand County Almanac—now translated into 11 languages—brings the organization $40,000 a year in royalties. The Leopolds also publish a magazine and popular handbooks on the ecological management of woodlands. Foundation personnel give seminars and lectures to general, professional, and governmental audiences, and are nearing completion of an hourlong film, Green Fire, on the land-ethic concept. "We should allow the land to speak," Ms. Leopold said in her Cosmos acceptance speech.
Still an active scholar at 83, she will spend some of the remaining prize money on a new microscope for her laboratory at Washington. "You're never too old for good equipment," she says.
What has driven her commitment to conservation all these years? The popularity of the green movement, for starters. "Admittedly it has been only a small segment of the culture, of the United States, that has been interested in ethical treatment of land," she says. "So it's kind of a cult. But it's growing, and God knows we need that."
January 31, 2010
Mary Daly, Feminist Theologian Who Nettled the Patriarchy, Dies at 81
In the 1950s, few women studied Roman Catholic theology, and
when Mary Daly did, she met a hostile reception. Men often refused to
sit near her, and she found herself isolated in classrooms.
But that did not deter Ms. Daly, an acclaimed theologian and social activist, who died on January 3 in Gardner, Mass., after a long illness, at the age of 81.
Born to poor Irish-American parents in Schenectady, N.Y., Ms. Daly earned a bachelor's degree in theology from the College of Saint Rose, in Albany, N.Y., followed by a master's in English from the Catholic University of America and a doctorate in religion from St. Mary's College, in Notre Dame, Ind.
She pressed on to complete four more degrees in philosophy and theology at the University of Fribourg, in Switzerland, a bastion of Catholic theology.
Armed with those credentials, Ms. Daly found a teaching position at Boston College in 1967 as it was making its transition from an all-male to a coeducational institution. There she began a long and controversial career that would make her a thorn in the side of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States and a leading figure in American feminism.
"Hers was a bracing, literate, sometimes infuriating, always provocative challenge that bravely cleared a space in the Christian intellectual world for fresh thinking about the place of gender and power in religion and theological reflection," said John McDargh, an associate professor of theology and Ms. Daly's longtime colleague at Boston College, in an e-mail message.
Her first two books, The Church and the Second Sex (1968) and Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (1973), announced her project of denouncing Catholicism's male hierarchy, male-centeredness, and attitudes toward women in the church and in daily life. The first book prompted Boston College to fire her, only to rehire her when students and fellow feminists protested.
She battled administrators of the Jesuit institution during much of her 32-year tenure because of her refusal to teach men in her advanced courses in women's studies. Her goal, she said, was to preserve those classes as places where women would "feel free to really talk and explore ideas," without self-editing. She asked male students who wished to enroll to study privately with her, rather than disrupt the classes.
That stance eventually led to her being forced into retirement from the college, in 1999, after two male students, supported by the conservative political-action group Center for Individual Rights, threatened to bring a lawsuit against the college.
Father Robert Daly (no relation), who chaired the theology department during much of Ms. Daly's time at Boston College, said she "fairly clearly defined the outer limits of radical feminist theology." Her attempt to teach just women "was at odds with any university's policies and also with federal regulations," he told The Chronicle. But, he said, "I really admired her for the clarity and consistency with which she lived out the consequences of her convictions."
Ms. Daly could not have aided her case by the way she stated it—"We've seized this space on the boundary of a patriarchal institution" was a characteristic expression—nor by calling college officials, in her trademark wordplay, "bore-ocrats."
Ms. Daly wrote seven books, including Gyn/Ecology, the Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) and (with Jane Caputi) Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (1987), which she called "a dictionary for Wicked women." She sought to reclaim words like "wicked" that church patriarchs had used as terms of disapprobation of women. In autobiographical writings, she explained that she called herself a "positively revolting hag" to denote her "revulsion from phallic institutions and morality."
Former students spoke of her in glowing terms. Emily Erwin Culpepper, a student of Ms. Daly's in the 1970s who is now a professor of women's and gender studies and religious studies at the University of Redlands, describes Ms. Daly as "amazingly brilliant and complicated," as well as ground-breaking, outspoken, and blunt. "Most of the time, her bluntness was very witty and exhilarating," Ms. Culpepper says, "but if you didn't agree, you could get very mad at her. That was not an uncommon phenomenon."
Other praise can be found on a Web site set up by her estate. It includes links to obituaries and commentaries, as well as to information on gatherings held in Ms. Daly's memory.
But that did not deter Ms. Daly, an acclaimed theologian and social activist, who died on January 3 in Gardner, Mass., after a long illness, at the age of 81.
Born to poor Irish-American parents in Schenectady, N.Y., Ms. Daly earned a bachelor's degree in theology from the College of Saint Rose, in Albany, N.Y., followed by a master's in English from the Catholic University of America and a doctorate in religion from St. Mary's College, in Notre Dame, Ind.
She pressed on to complete four more degrees in philosophy and theology at the University of Fribourg, in Switzerland, a bastion of Catholic theology.
Armed with those credentials, Ms. Daly found a teaching position at Boston College in 1967 as it was making its transition from an all-male to a coeducational institution. There she began a long and controversial career that would make her a thorn in the side of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States and a leading figure in American feminism.
"Hers was a bracing, literate, sometimes infuriating, always provocative challenge that bravely cleared a space in the Christian intellectual world for fresh thinking about the place of gender and power in religion and theological reflection," said John McDargh, an associate professor of theology and Ms. Daly's longtime colleague at Boston College, in an e-mail message.
Her first two books, The Church and the Second Sex (1968) and Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (1973), announced her project of denouncing Catholicism's male hierarchy, male-centeredness, and attitudes toward women in the church and in daily life. The first book prompted Boston College to fire her, only to rehire her when students and fellow feminists protested.
She battled administrators of the Jesuit institution during much of her 32-year tenure because of her refusal to teach men in her advanced courses in women's studies. Her goal, she said, was to preserve those classes as places where women would "feel free to really talk and explore ideas," without self-editing. She asked male students who wished to enroll to study privately with her, rather than disrupt the classes.
That stance eventually led to her being forced into retirement from the college, in 1999, after two male students, supported by the conservative political-action group Center for Individual Rights, threatened to bring a lawsuit against the college.
Father Robert Daly (no relation), who chaired the theology department during much of Ms. Daly's time at Boston College, said she "fairly clearly defined the outer limits of radical feminist theology." Her attempt to teach just women "was at odds with any university's policies and also with federal regulations," he told The Chronicle. But, he said, "I really admired her for the clarity and consistency with which she lived out the consequences of her convictions."
Ms. Daly could not have aided her case by the way she stated it—"We've seized this space on the boundary of a patriarchal institution" was a characteristic expression—nor by calling college officials, in her trademark wordplay, "bore-ocrats."
Ms. Daly wrote seven books, including Gyn/Ecology, the Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) and (with Jane Caputi) Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (1987), which she called "a dictionary for Wicked women." She sought to reclaim words like "wicked" that church patriarchs had used as terms of disapprobation of women. In autobiographical writings, she explained that she called herself a "positively revolting hag" to denote her "revulsion from phallic institutions and morality."
Former students spoke of her in glowing terms. Emily Erwin Culpepper, a student of Ms. Daly's in the 1970s who is now a professor of women's and gender studies and religious studies at the University of Redlands, describes Ms. Daly as "amazingly brilliant and complicated," as well as ground-breaking, outspoken, and blunt. "Most of the time, her bluntness was very witty and exhilarating," Ms. Culpepper says, "but if you didn't agree, you could get very mad at her. That was not an uncommon phenomenon."
Other praise can be found on a Web site set up by her estate. It includes links to obituaries and commentaries, as well as to information on gatherings held in Ms. Daly's memory.
January 17, 2010
MIT President Who Weathered Vietnam War-Era Protests Dies at 87
Howard W. Johnson, who was president of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology during the era of campus protests over the
United States' involvement in the Vietnam War and its poor record of
race relations, died at his home in Lexington, Mass., last month, at the
age of 87, after a long illness.
During and after the campus crises of the late 1960s, many in the MIT community credited Mr. Johnson with responding to the events with the calm, patience, and humor that he had developed as a specialist in personnel and management relations.
Ironically, the protests came after he had called for greater involvement of students in decision making at the university. In his 1968 annual report to the MIT Corporation, the university's governing body, he said such a change would prepare the institution "to take the wind now coming up."
The wind did kick up. Many undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members were unhappy that military-research funds accounted for two-thirds of MIT's total research budget. Mr. Johnson allowed that the protesters had valid arguments and promised to reduce the university's dependence on those funds. Arguing for MIT's greater involvement in urban issues, he oversaw the creation of programs in community development, housing, and transportation.
He had undertaken to pursue such efforts early in his presidency, which began in 1966 when he was only 44. That year he told The Chronicle, for its inaugural issue: "If a man is going to be a leader in this country, or a leader in society in general, he has to have backgrounds in both science and the humanities. That's the kind of man I hope we're going to turn out increasingly at MIT."
Still, tensions rose. In March 1969, a group of young faculty members and graduate students formed the Science Action Coordinating Committee and helped to organize a one-day work stoppage on the campus. That prompted several other campuses around the country to do the same.
Mr. Johnson, who had called for a balanced response to military and societal issues, was among 70 college and university presidents who in October 1969 called on the Nixon Administration to hasten American military withdrawal from Vietnam.
That was not enough for a coalition of Cambridge-area radical organizations, including the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers, who in November of that year demonstrated on the campus, and occupied and trashed Mr. Johnson's office. He kept the university running, even though as many as one in eight of MIT's 8,000 students watched or took part in the demonstrations. Upon orders from Cambridge city officials, police removed about 350 demonstrators from the entrance to a military-research laboratory near the campus; they were protesting MIT's multimillion-dollar government defense contracts. In May 1970, Mr. Johnson led MIT's divestment of one of its two major defense-research laboratories.
Upon Mr. Johnson's death last month, one of his successors, Paul Gray, said of him in a written statement: "He kept the institute from flying apart when there was so much concern, so much noisy demonstration, and so much division."
Some faculty members who were on the campus during those fractious years, though, have less sanguine memories of Mr. Johnson's leadership, and they were disappointed that he did not distance the institution further from militarism.
Mr. Johnson was born in Chicago in 1922, and graduated in business from Central College, in that city, in 1943. He served in the Army during World War II before earning a master's degree in economics from the University of Chicago, where he stayed on to teach from 1948 to 1955.
He then went to MIT as an associate professor of management, and was appointed the dean of the management school in 1959. In 1966, he became MIT's 12th president. He held the position until 1971, when he became chairman of the MIT Corporation, where he served officially until 1983 and in an advisory capacity for many more years.
He also served as a member, trustee, or director of many governmental bodies and Boston-area corporations and civic and arts organizations. In 1999, David Warsh, a Boston Globe columnist, wrote: "It is a dangerous thing to describe a single man as having decisively shaped present-day Boston. ... But if there is such a person, his name is Howard Johnson. [His] myriad little decisions as a leader of corporate boards, foundations, museums, and government agencies add up to influence of remarkable force."
Jean Dixon, U. of Nevada at Reno
During and after the campus crises of the late 1960s, many in the MIT community credited Mr. Johnson with responding to the events with the calm, patience, and humor that he had developed as a specialist in personnel and management relations.
Ironically, the protests came after he had called for greater involvement of students in decision making at the university. In his 1968 annual report to the MIT Corporation, the university's governing body, he said such a change would prepare the institution "to take the wind now coming up."
The wind did kick up. Many undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members were unhappy that military-research funds accounted for two-thirds of MIT's total research budget. Mr. Johnson allowed that the protesters had valid arguments and promised to reduce the university's dependence on those funds. Arguing for MIT's greater involvement in urban issues, he oversaw the creation of programs in community development, housing, and transportation.
He had undertaken to pursue such efforts early in his presidency, which began in 1966 when he was only 44. That year he told The Chronicle, for its inaugural issue: "If a man is going to be a leader in this country, or a leader in society in general, he has to have backgrounds in both science and the humanities. That's the kind of man I hope we're going to turn out increasingly at MIT."
Still, tensions rose. In March 1969, a group of young faculty members and graduate students formed the Science Action Coordinating Committee and helped to organize a one-day work stoppage on the campus. That prompted several other campuses around the country to do the same.
Mr. Johnson, who had called for a balanced response to military and societal issues, was among 70 college and university presidents who in October 1969 called on the Nixon Administration to hasten American military withdrawal from Vietnam.
That was not enough for a coalition of Cambridge-area radical organizations, including the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers, who in November of that year demonstrated on the campus, and occupied and trashed Mr. Johnson's office. He kept the university running, even though as many as one in eight of MIT's 8,000 students watched or took part in the demonstrations. Upon orders from Cambridge city officials, police removed about 350 demonstrators from the entrance to a military-research laboratory near the campus; they were protesting MIT's multimillion-dollar government defense contracts. In May 1970, Mr. Johnson led MIT's divestment of one of its two major defense-research laboratories.
Upon Mr. Johnson's death last month, one of his successors, Paul Gray, said of him in a written statement: "He kept the institute from flying apart when there was so much concern, so much noisy demonstration, and so much division."
Some faculty members who were on the campus during those fractious years, though, have less sanguine memories of Mr. Johnson's leadership, and they were disappointed that he did not distance the institution further from militarism.
Mr. Johnson was born in Chicago in 1922, and graduated in business from Central College, in that city, in 1943. He served in the Army during World War II before earning a master's degree in economics from the University of Chicago, where he stayed on to teach from 1948 to 1955.
He then went to MIT as an associate professor of management, and was appointed the dean of the management school in 1959. In 1966, he became MIT's 12th president. He held the position until 1971, when he became chairman of the MIT Corporation, where he served officially until 1983 and in an advisory capacity for many more years.
He also served as a member, trustee, or director of many governmental bodies and Boston-area corporations and civic and arts organizations. In 1999, David Warsh, a Boston Globe columnist, wrote: "It is a dangerous thing to describe a single man as having decisively shaped present-day Boston. ... But if there is such a person, his name is Howard Johnson. [His] myriad little decisions as a leader of corporate boards, foundations, museums, and government agencies add up to influence of remarkable force."
January 3, 2010
Activist Professor's New Cause: a National Museum for Latinos
Jean Dixon, U. of Nevada at Reno
The time has come for Latinos in the United States to receive
their due credit, in the form of a museum on Washington's National Mall
alongside the country's other great showcases of culture, says Emma
Sepúlveda Pulvirenti, a professor of Spanish at the University of Nevada
at Reno.
She was appointed in September to a commission to study the feasibility of such a museum. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid, Democrat of Nevada, who has long known Ms. Sepúlveda, named her to the 23-person panel. "Her commitment to improving the lives of Latinos in Nevada makes her an ideal pick," he said in an e-mail message.
Within two years, commission members must submit a report to Congress and the White House on a plan for the museum, which would celebrate Latinos' art, history, and culture.
"Latinos are 45 to 50 million people living in the United States today," says the professor. "That's a significant number of people, and they were here before the Mayflower. I will find it very difficult to believe that this museum will not become a reality."
Being named to the commission is the latest accomplishment in a professional life of teaching, artistic pursuits, and community activism.
Ms. Sepúlveda is the author or co-author of 22 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, in Spanish and English. One of them records her unsuccessful campaign for the Nevada State Senate in 1994; another collects her columns from the Reno Gazette-Journal. She also edited We, Chile: Personal Testimonies of the Chilean Arpilleristas (Azul Editions, 1996), a compilation of accounts by women whose family members "disappeared" during the Pinochet dictatorship.
In November she received an award from the National Hispana Leadership Institute, in recognition of her many roles as an academic and activist. She also directs the university's Latino Research Center, whose work includes studies of health and demographic issues. In one project, the center has distributed 500 cameras to Latinos throughout the state so they can document their experience.
Her colleagues depict her as charismatic and a talented strategist when it comes to getting things done. "She is very energetic, very passionate, and very active," says Darrell B. Lockhart, an associate professor of Spanish. "I don't know how she finds all the time to do it all."
For one thing, Ms. Sepúlveda says, she gets up early and writes, no matter what. "I'm a person who is extremely focused. When I get in front of a project, I don't stop until I get it done."
Her output is all the more remarkable given that she battles lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease. "I don't know how long my life is going to be," she says, "so I live every day like it's going to be my last."
She is, in any case, accustomed to adversity. Born in Argentina in 1950, she fled with her family to Chile after the fall of President Juan Domingo Perón, in 1955.
As Marjorie Agosín, a Chilean with whom she has collaborated on a number of books, relates in A Woman's Gaze: Latin American Women Artists (White Pine Press, 1998), Ms. Sepúlveda became involved in social causes and worked to influence the poor of Chile to elect Salvador Allende. The overthrow of Allende's socialist government, in 1973, disrupted her political work and university studies. Declared persona non grata, she made an arduous, overland journey to the United States.
At Reno she completed bachelor's and master's degrees in Spanish literature and received her first formal training in photography. Divorced, then remarried, she moved to California to complete a doctorate in Spanish literature at the University of California at Davis, became an American citizen in 1979, and began to make her mark in photography. She often explored the female form as a "subject of representation rather than mute objectified form," as Ms. Agosín notes in her book.
Back in Reno, Ms. Sepúlveda continued to pursue social causes, particularly immigrants' rights and the fate of Chile's political prisoners. She became the first Latina full professor at Reno, has served on more than 25 nonprofit boards, and in 1995 founded Latinos for Political Education, a get-out-the-vote group.
Her stands have sometimes brought hostile reactions. Callers to her home must get past a screening service. Most recently she has been criticized for her opposition to a campus speaking engagement by a founder of the Minuteman Project, which calls for strict enforcement of immigration controls.
"But I'm constantly the focus of hate mail and death threats," says Ms. Sepúlveda, who organized a separate campus forum on immigration at the same time as the Minuteman appearance.
"It must be very difficult to withstand those kinds of attacks, based in ignorance and racism and hatred," says Sheila Leslie, a state legislator, who has known Ms. Sepúlveda since they were in graduate school together. "But she has persevered."
Of her advocacy on behalf of immigrants and Latinos, Ms. Sepúlveda says, "It hasn't been easy, but it has been extremely rewarding. I'm happy that I've taken this road."
She was appointed in September to a commission to study the feasibility of such a museum. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid, Democrat of Nevada, who has long known Ms. Sepúlveda, named her to the 23-person panel. "Her commitment to improving the lives of Latinos in Nevada makes her an ideal pick," he said in an e-mail message.
Within two years, commission members must submit a report to Congress and the White House on a plan for the museum, which would celebrate Latinos' art, history, and culture.
"Latinos are 45 to 50 million people living in the United States today," says the professor. "That's a significant number of people, and they were here before the Mayflower. I will find it very difficult to believe that this museum will not become a reality."
Being named to the commission is the latest accomplishment in a professional life of teaching, artistic pursuits, and community activism.
Ms. Sepúlveda is the author or co-author of 22 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, in Spanish and English. One of them records her unsuccessful campaign for the Nevada State Senate in 1994; another collects her columns from the Reno Gazette-Journal. She also edited We, Chile: Personal Testimonies of the Chilean Arpilleristas (Azul Editions, 1996), a compilation of accounts by women whose family members "disappeared" during the Pinochet dictatorship.
In November she received an award from the National Hispana Leadership Institute, in recognition of her many roles as an academic and activist. She also directs the university's Latino Research Center, whose work includes studies of health and demographic issues. In one project, the center has distributed 500 cameras to Latinos throughout the state so they can document their experience.
Her colleagues depict her as charismatic and a talented strategist when it comes to getting things done. "She is very energetic, very passionate, and very active," says Darrell B. Lockhart, an associate professor of Spanish. "I don't know how she finds all the time to do it all."
For one thing, Ms. Sepúlveda says, she gets up early and writes, no matter what. "I'm a person who is extremely focused. When I get in front of a project, I don't stop until I get it done."
Her output is all the more remarkable given that she battles lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease. "I don't know how long my life is going to be," she says, "so I live every day like it's going to be my last."
She is, in any case, accustomed to adversity. Born in Argentina in 1950, she fled with her family to Chile after the fall of President Juan Domingo Perón, in 1955.
As Marjorie Agosín, a Chilean with whom she has collaborated on a number of books, relates in A Woman's Gaze: Latin American Women Artists (White Pine Press, 1998), Ms. Sepúlveda became involved in social causes and worked to influence the poor of Chile to elect Salvador Allende. The overthrow of Allende's socialist government, in 1973, disrupted her political work and university studies. Declared persona non grata, she made an arduous, overland journey to the United States.
At Reno she completed bachelor's and master's degrees in Spanish literature and received her first formal training in photography. Divorced, then remarried, she moved to California to complete a doctorate in Spanish literature at the University of California at Davis, became an American citizen in 1979, and began to make her mark in photography. She often explored the female form as a "subject of representation rather than mute objectified form," as Ms. Agosín notes in her book.
Back in Reno, Ms. Sepúlveda continued to pursue social causes, particularly immigrants' rights and the fate of Chile's political prisoners. She became the first Latina full professor at Reno, has served on more than 25 nonprofit boards, and in 1995 founded Latinos for Political Education, a get-out-the-vote group.
Her stands have sometimes brought hostile reactions. Callers to her home must get past a screening service. Most recently she has been criticized for her opposition to a campus speaking engagement by a founder of the Minuteman Project, which calls for strict enforcement of immigration controls.
"But I'm constantly the focus of hate mail and death threats," says Ms. Sepúlveda, who organized a separate campus forum on immigration at the same time as the Minuteman appearance.
"It must be very difficult to withstand those kinds of attacks, based in ignorance and racism and hatred," says Sheila Leslie, a state legislator, who has known Ms. Sepúlveda since they were in graduate school together. "But she has persevered."
Of her advocacy on behalf of immigrants and Latinos, Ms. Sepúlveda says, "It hasn't been easy, but it has been extremely rewarding. I'm happy that I've taken this road."
November 1, 2009
A Rescuer of Famous Paintings Steps Into the Light
An art conservator who set up North America's first doctoral
program in preservation studies, at the University of Delaware, has been
named to a new chair in material culture, the study of societies'
artifacts.
Joyce Hill Stoner's appointment adds heft to her research on the repair of paintings, allows her to continue preserving them herself, and gives her more say in teaching both the study and the craft of art conservation to her students.
Ms. Stoner's peers describe the 63-year-old conservator as prolific, and brilliant in conservatorship, research, and teaching, says Joann Browning, Delaware's associate dean for the arts.
After serving as head paintings conservator at the Winterthur Museum & Country Estate from 1976 to 1980, and leading the museum's entire conservation division from 1980 to 1982, Ms. Stoner directed the Winterthur-University of Delaware program in art conservation until 1997. The former estate of Henry Francis du Pont, Winterthur displays his collections of antiques and Americana. Delaware students use the museum's analytical laboratory and conservation studios.
In 1990, Ms. Stoner set up North America's first doctoral program in preservation studies at Delaware, even before she had completed her own Ph.D. (There are now two others, at New York University and the State University of New York College at Buffalo.) Her dissertation, for a Ph.D. in art history at NYU, discussed the techniques and materials James McNeill Whistler used for his paintings, lithographs, and decorative interiors, all of which Ms. Stoner treated as a conservator. She became a full professor of art conservation in 1996.
Since 2005, she has directed Delaware's preservation-studies doctoral program, which awards about 10 master's degrees and one or two doctorates a year. The department has six full-time faculty members, and conservators from Winterthur also teach courses. Dissertation supervisors come from several departments, including anthropology, chemistry, history, and historic preservation.
Ms. Stoner calls being a named professor "the best job in the world" because "you can pick your goals and pursue them like a bullet train."
For her, that means teaching, conserving paintings, studying issues in art preservation, and writing dozens of essays and book chapters on her craft. With a colleague, she is editing a 700-page volume, Conservation of Easel Paintings, due out in 2011. The chair also provides new travel funds, and requires Ms. Stoner to give a public lecture.
She rates among her proudest accomplishments her years as senior conservator for the meticulous restoration of Whistler's Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington between 1987 and 1992.
Another high point, she says, was her supervision of work in 1998 on "Apotheosis of the Family," a 19-by-60-foot mural by N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945) that enlivened the lobby of a bank in downtown Wilmington, Del.
But Ms. Stoner's greatest thrill, she says, was sitting for a portrait by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), after she became a conservator of the younger Wyeth's paintings. "I have shoulder-length red hair, which was a really good thing in Wyeth's world," she explains. The canvas hangs in her workshop at the Winterthur museum.
Ms. Stoner and her colleagues at Winterthur have used X-rays and other techniques to detect illustrations that N.C. Wyeth painted over.
She almost became an artist herself. After growing up in Chevy Chase, Md., she studied fine arts at the College of William and Mary. Guidance counselors there suggested she had just the right mix of skills for art conservation, then a little-studied field. She earned a master's degree from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts in 1970 and a diploma in conservation from the NYU Conservation Center three years later.
She painted for a while, but she tired of the need to sell herself constantly, and she began to concentrate on conservation.
"Sitting in front of an easel, with a painting, you're essentially doing what you would be doing if you were painting. It's creative in a different way. If a canvas is torn, it must be gently cleaned, and then lined up, thread by thread. Then you have to imitate the original brush strokes in a detailed way."
Ms. Stoner hopes she will reach more people by speaking than she can by treating paintings one by one.
Her goal? "To stop people from throwing out their torn paintings. And if I can get to the public and say 'Do not clean your paintings with Ajax,' I'll have done well."
Joyce Hill Stoner's appointment adds heft to her research on the repair of paintings, allows her to continue preserving them herself, and gives her more say in teaching both the study and the craft of art conservation to her students.
Ms. Stoner's peers describe the 63-year-old conservator as prolific, and brilliant in conservatorship, research, and teaching, says Joann Browning, Delaware's associate dean for the arts.
After serving as head paintings conservator at the Winterthur Museum & Country Estate from 1976 to 1980, and leading the museum's entire conservation division from 1980 to 1982, Ms. Stoner directed the Winterthur-University of Delaware program in art conservation until 1997. The former estate of Henry Francis du Pont, Winterthur displays his collections of antiques and Americana. Delaware students use the museum's analytical laboratory and conservation studios.
In 1990, Ms. Stoner set up North America's first doctoral program in preservation studies at Delaware, even before she had completed her own Ph.D. (There are now two others, at New York University and the State University of New York College at Buffalo.) Her dissertation, for a Ph.D. in art history at NYU, discussed the techniques and materials James McNeill Whistler used for his paintings, lithographs, and decorative interiors, all of which Ms. Stoner treated as a conservator. She became a full professor of art conservation in 1996.
Since 2005, she has directed Delaware's preservation-studies doctoral program, which awards about 10 master's degrees and one or two doctorates a year. The department has six full-time faculty members, and conservators from Winterthur also teach courses. Dissertation supervisors come from several departments, including anthropology, chemistry, history, and historic preservation.
Ms. Stoner calls being a named professor "the best job in the world" because "you can pick your goals and pursue them like a bullet train."
For her, that means teaching, conserving paintings, studying issues in art preservation, and writing dozens of essays and book chapters on her craft. With a colleague, she is editing a 700-page volume, Conservation of Easel Paintings, due out in 2011. The chair also provides new travel funds, and requires Ms. Stoner to give a public lecture.
She rates among her proudest accomplishments her years as senior conservator for the meticulous restoration of Whistler's Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington between 1987 and 1992.
Another high point, she says, was her supervision of work in 1998 on "Apotheosis of the Family," a 19-by-60-foot mural by N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945) that enlivened the lobby of a bank in downtown Wilmington, Del.
But Ms. Stoner's greatest thrill, she says, was sitting for a portrait by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), after she became a conservator of the younger Wyeth's paintings. "I have shoulder-length red hair, which was a really good thing in Wyeth's world," she explains. The canvas hangs in her workshop at the Winterthur museum.
Ms. Stoner and her colleagues at Winterthur have used X-rays and other techniques to detect illustrations that N.C. Wyeth painted over.
She almost became an artist herself. After growing up in Chevy Chase, Md., she studied fine arts at the College of William and Mary. Guidance counselors there suggested she had just the right mix of skills for art conservation, then a little-studied field. She earned a master's degree from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts in 1970 and a diploma in conservation from the NYU Conservation Center three years later.
She painted for a while, but she tired of the need to sell herself constantly, and she began to concentrate on conservation.
"Sitting in front of an easel, with a painting, you're essentially doing what you would be doing if you were painting. It's creative in a different way. If a canvas is torn, it must be gently cleaned, and then lined up, thread by thread. Then you have to imitate the original brush strokes in a detailed way."
Ms. Stoner hopes she will reach more people by speaking than she can by treating paintings one by one.
Her goal? "To stop people from throwing out their torn paintings. And if I can get to the public and say 'Do not clean your paintings with Ajax,' I'll have done well."
May 21, 2009
A Lawyer Returns to the Birthplace of His Career
Kevin K. Washburn, 41, knows why he became a lawyer. During
the summer of 1990, after graduating in economics from the University of
Oklahoma, he attended a workshop of the University of New Mexico's
American Indian Law Center, and it changed his life. "Suddenly I was
told it was not only OK but wonderful to be an American Indian," he
says. "That was liberating for me."
A member of the Chickasaw Nation, he grew up in small towns in what had earlier been the tribe's reservation. "I did well at school —my mother taught me the Chickasaw work ethic," he says. But rural Oklahoma, with its racial hostilities and its limitations for a young, imaginative man, "was a hard place to be young and American Indian."
Of his stay at the campus in Albuquerque, in a program that has long provided prospective law students with a "boot camp" that mimics the first year of law school, he says: "It was a magical summer. The instructors were very public-spirited, very committed to teaching, and very good at it. I gained my identity as a scholar from them."
On July 1, he will return to New Mexico's law school as a leading scholar and practi tioner of American Indian law. And as its new dean.
Several search-committee members, and eventually the interim dean, Leo M. Romero, persuaded him to apply for the job. "I was not on the dean market," he says. "I've long appreciated being a professor, and being a dean is an unfathomable responsibility."
But benefits came to mind, too, particularly the opportunity to inspire in others the sense of purpose he drew from that 1990 summer program. He called many of New Mexico's law-faculty members —34 full-timers including some former deans —and now can say: "I've long felt a debt to this school, and this job represents my very full and robust commitment to repaying it."
After that summer program, Mr. Washburn enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis's law school and then in his second year moved to Yale Law School, where he edited The Yale Journal on Regulation. A clerkship at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit followed. In 1994, an honors program took him to the Department of Justice in Washington, to litigate tribal natural-resource and environmental claims.
From 1997 until 2000, as a federal prosecutor in New Mexico, he worked on cases of violent crime in Indian country. That could be depressing, he says: "People do terrible things when they are without hope." But he relished some aspects of the job: "Bumping along in the desert was certainly great fun," he says of a typical workday. "I was never more interesting at cocktail parties."
In 2000, at only 32, he became general counsel to the National Indian Gaming Commission, an independent federal regulatory agency. But he had begun to think that, as several Yale classmates had become law professors, why couldn't he? He had by that time accumulated plenty of knowledge that would permit him to teach. So, in 2002 he took a position at the University of Minnesota's law school, and then spent the 2007-8 academic year at Harvard Law School as the Oneida Indian Nation Visiting Associate Professor of Law. Last August, he was recruited to the University of Arizona.
In books and articles on gaming and other issues in American Indian life, and in testimony before Congress, he has argued that federal authorities have a "cavalry effect" on prosecutions on reservations: When the Federal Bureau of Investigation sends in agents, tribal members clam up, mindful of a long history of disruptive incursions. Why not defer to more effective tribal courts, he asks.
Although most tribes have court systems, federal law governs more than 300 types of crime in Indian country. So, Mr. Washburn, who is a tribally appointed chief judge of the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe Court of Appeals of Michigan —his third tribal judgeship —has lobbied hard for new legislation. This year, for the second time, Sen. Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, has introduced the Tribal Law and Order Act, which would carry out changes like the ones Mr. Washburn has recommended.
His are not, certainly, the only ideas contained in the bill, which is expected to win approval this year. Yet Mr. Washburn can say: "It makes me feel like I've achieved some modicum of success in legal academe."
Soon he will be the first American Indian head of New Mexico's School of Law, which has a long tradition of educating Indian lawyers. And he is receiving a warm welcome. The interim dean, Mr. Romero, says Mr. Washburn's presence at the school guarantees the healthy continuation of American Indian-law activities. And while Mr. Washburn says he is not sure he has "any special gifts for deaning," Mr. Romero marks that up to humility: "He brings a lot. His scholarship has got really national attention. He's well regarded as an excellent legal thinker."
A member of the Chickasaw Nation, he grew up in small towns in what had earlier been the tribe's reservation. "I did well at school —my mother taught me the Chickasaw work ethic," he says. But rural Oklahoma, with its racial hostilities and its limitations for a young, imaginative man, "was a hard place to be young and American Indian."
Of his stay at the campus in Albuquerque, in a program that has long provided prospective law students with a "boot camp" that mimics the first year of law school, he says: "It was a magical summer. The instructors were very public-spirited, very committed to teaching, and very good at it. I gained my identity as a scholar from them."
On July 1, he will return to New Mexico's law school as a leading scholar and practi tioner of American Indian law. And as its new dean.
Several search-committee members, and eventually the interim dean, Leo M. Romero, persuaded him to apply for the job. "I was not on the dean market," he says. "I've long appreciated being a professor, and being a dean is an unfathomable responsibility."
But benefits came to mind, too, particularly the opportunity to inspire in others the sense of purpose he drew from that 1990 summer program. He called many of New Mexico's law-faculty members —34 full-timers including some former deans —and now can say: "I've long felt a debt to this school, and this job represents my very full and robust commitment to repaying it."
After that summer program, Mr. Washburn enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis's law school and then in his second year moved to Yale Law School, where he edited The Yale Journal on Regulation. A clerkship at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit followed. In 1994, an honors program took him to the Department of Justice in Washington, to litigate tribal natural-resource and environmental claims.
From 1997 until 2000, as a federal prosecutor in New Mexico, he worked on cases of violent crime in Indian country. That could be depressing, he says: "People do terrible things when they are without hope." But he relished some aspects of the job: "Bumping along in the desert was certainly great fun," he says of a typical workday. "I was never more interesting at cocktail parties."
In 2000, at only 32, he became general counsel to the National Indian Gaming Commission, an independent federal regulatory agency. But he had begun to think that, as several Yale classmates had become law professors, why couldn't he? He had by that time accumulated plenty of knowledge that would permit him to teach. So, in 2002 he took a position at the University of Minnesota's law school, and then spent the 2007-8 academic year at Harvard Law School as the Oneida Indian Nation Visiting Associate Professor of Law. Last August, he was recruited to the University of Arizona.
In books and articles on gaming and other issues in American Indian life, and in testimony before Congress, he has argued that federal authorities have a "cavalry effect" on prosecutions on reservations: When the Federal Bureau of Investigation sends in agents, tribal members clam up, mindful of a long history of disruptive incursions. Why not defer to more effective tribal courts, he asks.
Although most tribes have court systems, federal law governs more than 300 types of crime in Indian country. So, Mr. Washburn, who is a tribally appointed chief judge of the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe Court of Appeals of Michigan —his third tribal judgeship —has lobbied hard for new legislation. This year, for the second time, Sen. Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, has introduced the Tribal Law and Order Act, which would carry out changes like the ones Mr. Washburn has recommended.
His are not, certainly, the only ideas contained in the bill, which is expected to win approval this year. Yet Mr. Washburn can say: "It makes me feel like I've achieved some modicum of success in legal academe."
Soon he will be the first American Indian head of New Mexico's School of Law, which has a long tradition of educating Indian lawyers. And he is receiving a warm welcome. The interim dean, Mr. Romero, says Mr. Washburn's presence at the school guarantees the healthy continuation of American Indian-law activities. And while Mr. Washburn says he is not sure he has "any special gifts for deaning," Mr. Romero marks that up to humility: "He brings a lot. His scholarship has got really national attention. He's well regarded as an excellent legal thinker."
